


The Devil's Train

by Aeolian_Harp189



Series: Starry Eyed Dreamers [1]
Category: Danny Phantom, Gravity Falls
Genre: Danny and Dipper don't get along, F/M, Gothic imagery, Twist on Circus Gothica, What-If
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-04
Updated: 2017-10-15
Packaged: 2018-12-23 22:25:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 43,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11999181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aeolian_Harp189/pseuds/Aeolian_Harp189
Summary: In the dead of a summer's night, a train pulls into Gravity Falls. The next morning, flyers for the mysterious Circus Gothica are circulating, whispers of the strange performers hang on eager lips as the townfolk spend their day looking over their shoulders at the tent flags billowing between the pine trees. A snowy haired performer hands out flyers for tonight's events, his smile is lazy, his red eyes thoughtlessly pleasant while somewhere embedded in his thoughts lies the screams of a half forgotten life.Dipper has trouble sleeping and worries about a triangle that still might be alive while Mabel would rather forget herself in girlish teenage trifles again.And what better place is there to forget or to find some answers than at the Circus?





	1. The Mystery Shack

**Author's Note:**

> Hi Everyone!  
> It's nice to meet you all, I hope you like my work! It's my first time writing on this site (actually it's kind of my first time doing anything like this in general :) ) and I thought I'd give it a whirl! If you like my work or would like to give feedback or ask me some deep questions about life (I've narrowed the meaning of life down to three possibilities: food, dogs or Netflixs), then feel free to post in the comments, I'd love to hear from you all!  
> :)

And now, I scream. That is the best way to describe my situation, where all around me is nothing but darkness, nothing but the horrors of the everlasting shade. I cannot run, cannot escape. I kneel to the force that suppresses me, the weight of my chains too much to bear, too much to resist, though by all the stars and all the saint’s I’ve tried. And tried. And now I am spent. I kneel to my master, like a beaten dog I submit, as passive as any slave who has come to accept their fate, their wrecked lot in life. 

My friends are dead, I watched my own body destroy them, I watched as my home, my family and everything I had ever known or loved slipped through my hands. If I could have but the strength to grasp them, to resist but they slipped through my slackened fingers and all I could do was watch and obey the will of my master. My brutal, wicked master. 

I hate him. With every ounce of my soul, I hate him. I wake hating him, I lie down to sleep hating him and every moment in between I live and breathe and exist only to hate him. But what does it matter by how much I hate him? When have my writhing feelings ever so much as led to a single scorched stitch on his sleeve? A single misplaced dotted i on his papers? I still bow to him, and his command is mine to suffer and obey. 

Mine is to suffer as his angry blows fall upon my non resisting form, mine to seethe as he heaps one insult upon the other, as heinous tasks follow one another like marching ants crawling over my skin. I am trapped, I am hopeless, I am lost. And there is nothing left to me but to scream.

***

Dipper had chewed through all of his pens again. It wasn’t his fault, in his protest he was in the midst of a project and whenever he was working, it had the tendency to leave his teeth worse for wear and his pens in relatively short supply. So he was scrounging through his sister Mabel’s junk on her side of the attic in search of something to write with. 

It was easier said than done, as Mabel’s side of the room could be described as a glittery cacophony of chaos, consisting of everything ranging from a nine headed stuff animal with a single marble for an eye (which animal it was trying to imitate, Dipper would never know), to ten varying shades of glitter glue, to heaps of teen boy magazines their parents would never be contented with her having if they ever knew Grunkle Stan bought them for her, to a collection of decoratively drawn eggs that smelled like they were starting to turn. 

It wasn’t until Dipper threw the eggs out (he was wondering what was starting to smell) when he found Mabel’s colouring kit sticking out from under her mattress and extracted a silver glittering pencil with a googly eyed alien where the eraser ought to have been. Dipper smirked, pleased at his discovery and yeah, the alien was kind of cute. He stood up and wandered back over to his side of the slanted, sparrow infested, rickety in all its perfection attic that served as their summer bedroom while staying with their Grunkles in Gravity Falls. 

His side was no less cluttered and messy than his sister’s, just in varying ways. His Grunkle Ford had lent him his blackboard in order for him to organize his research but snippets of information had spread like a fungus to cover the rest of the back wall behind his bed, even going so far as to cover the painting of a venturing ship over a tumultuous green sea that was the favoured feature of his side of the room. 

There were strings of coloured coded yarn (curtsey of Mabel) connected the flow of information, giving it a erratic look, like a spider with Mabel’s lust for vibrant colours had been hyped up on three cans of power drinks and set loose on the wall. Dipper stared at the board, added a sticky note here or there to the display, a few more thoughts, a few more theories and paused to stare at the board some more. Absently he brought Mabel’s pencil to his mouth to chew on the end as he thought but regretted it instantly as he was left to spit out silvery sparkles like a sickly gnome. 

He turned his gaze back to the board and shook his head. He’d have to ask Ford his opinion on it; maybe he could ask to borrow some of Grunkle’s old notes. The Journals might be long burnt to a crisp but some of the old notes of the first draft were still lying around in a dishevelled mess down in the basement.

There was a bang downstairs as the door flew open, an excited squealing of the term “Dipper!” which, for the moment, Dipper wished wasn’t his name, followed by the thundering of footsteps and the practically kicking down of their bedroom’s wooden door.

“Diiiipppppeeeerrrr!” Mabel screamed, running into the room and plowing into her brother with the force of a runaway train, sending him down on his bed, his sister tumbling after him and sitting squarely on his chest to beam down at him.

“Mabel…” Dipper croaked, the wind knocked out of him.  
“Sorry, Dipper!” Mabel, scrambling off of her brother with a giggling laugh that sent her tumbling to the floor. “Guess what? Guess what? Guess WHAT??”

Dipper rolled onto his stomach to study his sister, dressed in all of her outrageous splendor. She had a pair of hot pink leggings on under a skirt of frilly blue, running shoes that were still splattered from paint of her last art project, a star spangled white t-shirt of her own design and star stickers crowding her plump cheeks and climbing in her tangled long brown hair. Which was to say, she was dressed in her casual attire.

“You’re…testing whether or not you can communicate with dolphins on a sonar level?” Dipper asked, an amused smile costing on the edge of his lips. Mabel tilted her head towards him; her eyes alight with their usual merriment. She scrunched up her face into a teasing fake annoyed look and she stuck out her tongue and blew him a raspberry.

“Please.” She answered, rolling onto her side so she and Dipper were mirrored images of each other. And in many ways they were anyway, same features, same hair, same height (much to Dipper’s dismay at them being fourteen and still rather short for their age), same everything except for the stuff that mattered. “I can already do that. Mermando taught me.” As if to prove it she gave an exaggerated chip in order to mockingly mimic Mabel’s old merman flame. 

The absurdity of the noise made Dipper break out into a light laughter, which in turn made Mabel beam. It was a known fact to Dipper that nothing pleased his sister more than making him laugh and so he liked to indulge her whenever possible.

“Besides, that’s not it.” Mabel went on, and digging into the waist lining of her skirt in a way their mother would have classified as indecent, Mabel produced a flyer that was nothing but pure black, save for the purple spider web design, flames and skulls lining the borders. At first glance, Dipper thought it was a flyer for Robbie’s third attempt at a band (this one was called Nightmare of the Living Dead (soooo original)), which made Dipper’s lips instinctively bubble with protests that they were not, in any way shape or form, supporting Robbie’s misguiding career in music. 

Despite the fact that the boy had been Dipper’s tormentor two summers ago (though not more so than Bill had), Mabel had kindled a strange friendship with moody teenager. Dipper wondered if it had anything to do with the fact that Robbie had a misunderstood loner kind of vibe to him and Mabel had a talent of feeling sorry for anything. But upon closer examination, Dipper saw that it wasn’t a flyer for Robbie’s band (thank the gods) but something called Circus Gothica.

“Um….” Dipper had no response to this. He looked at the poster; he looked at Mabel’s glitter flecked eager face and was stumped at what to make of it.  
“A…Goth Circus? Where ‘Your Darkest Nightmares Come Alive’….” Dipper read under the off putting title. “Mabel, I know you and Robbie are…ugh…friends but this-”

“No, no, this has nothing to do with Robbie, oh, though I should definitely send him a picture of this! He and the others of our older friend group would love this, don’t you think?” She said with a playful smirk as she took out her phone, snapped a quick picture of the poster on the floor amongst a dried out glue gun and a pink bedazzled model of Waddles Dipper had made for Mabel for their birthday last summer.

“I…guess they would,” Dipper said, thinking of Tambrey and Robbie, who would certainly like it the most, to Nate, Nelson, Tyler and Wendy, who would probably like it the least. Or at least, Dipper thought they would, apparently he was currently living in backwards country. “The more important question is why you would think you would like it, Mabel. Circus Gothica. A Goth Circus. Why would that even interest you? Right before we left for Gravity Falls you complained about the classroom not colour coordinating the periodic table.”

“It’s a valid argument! How is anyone supposed to learn what’s on the table, when all one can think of is how drab and un-matching the colours are!”  
“And when you say one, do you mean literally only one and that one being you?” Dipper asked playfully, sitting up and ignoring his sister sticking her tongue out at him in her defense again. 

“Mabel, if we go to a Goth circus, I think all the colours are going to be drab, black in particular, a lot of black.”  
A silly smile painted Mabel’s face as she giggled into her knuckles. “Yeah.” She said dreamily and Dipper frowned at her in puzzlement but a sense of the answer lingered just outside his scope of vision.

“What?” Mabel asked quickly when she caught her brother glaring.  
“Why do you want to go to this thing?” Dipper said resolutely and at last Mabel let out a great burst of excitement like a dam being broken.  
“Alright, alright, you caught me! This boy gave me the flyer for the Circus. He was so hot Dipper, you should have seen him!”  
“Unless he was actually on fire, I’ll pass.”

“No silly, not like that! He was tall and mysterious. Oh so mysterious! He had white hair! White hair and he was our age. Isn’t that the weirdest thing? He said that he’s a performer at the circus as an acrobat and he said that he’d be looking for me in the crowd. So you see Dipper, I have to go! The mysterious circus boy is expecting me to be there!”

Dipper rolled his eyes to the ceiling with a groan. That explained it, that explained everything. A tall, mysterious boy with white hair might have sort of almost flirted with Mabel. Her heart was as good as won.  
“Wait. Did you say white hair?” Dipper asked, sitting straight as his eyes suddenly turned to Mabel. She blinked and nodded.

“Yeah. Why?”  
Dipper looked back over to his board, chewing his lip in thought before rising from his bed.  
“Um…nothing. Probably. Can I see that flyer?”  
Mabel quirked an eyebrow at him but shrugged. “Sure, I guess. So are you coming?”

Dipper stared at the flyer, a blank, wordless expression painting his face before he even registered that his sister had spoken at all.  
“What? Oh, um…I might be. Just don’t leave without telling me, okay? I’ll be in the basement with Ford.”

“You got it, bro-bro.” Mabel said with a wink and a click of her teeth. “What do you have to talk to Ford about? You’re not saying this circus is…weird, are you? It’s not from Gravity Falls, dude. It’s not from anywhere, really. It just kind of-”  
“Showed up?” Dipper said with a meaningful glance over at his sister. “Wouldn’t a circus advertise its tour? Or make a spectacle of showing up? When did this circus get here anyway? Why is it that its opening act is tonight and I’m only hearing about it now?”

Mabel stared at him, a stunned expression crossing her face as the inquisitive nature that Dipper was naturally inclined to only now settling into her features.  
“It…showed up sometime last night. Yesterday there was nothing, today: shabam, circus train. But…but I’m sure it’s nothing Dipper. Really. Maybe it’s all just a part of its mystique.”  
“Fine, then do a search for them online, I’ll go ask Ford about this.”  
Mabel rolled her eyes, the inquisitive nature quick to vanish. “Do we always have to do a background check on everything we do?”

“Maybe, if one of these times one of the things we do in Gravity Falls didn’t lead to life threatening situations.”  
Mabel twisted her mouth to the side of her face in annoyance. “Good point.” She said dully before getting to her feet and wandering over to her laptop.

Dipper smiled at the back of her head, for no other reason than because his sister could sometimes, on the rare occasion, be the best. Like now, as she played along with his conspiracies, which as of two summers ago, had stopped being so crazy.  
Then he walked down the rickety, splitter inducing staircase, his thoughts whirling in his head as he tried to shake Mabel’s voice from his brain: ‘probably nothing, probably nothing’. Sure, but first we’ll be certain Mabel.

Grunkle Stan was in the living room, indecently clad in boxers and a muscle shirt, as was his usual attire when at home, and sometimes even when he was out and about the town. People often cringed but had long given up caring. He was throwing back a large can of pit cola and watching the squat television set that was more wood and bunny eared wiring than anything else. The room smelled like that vivid scent of pine needles and rain that tended to permeate the place. Dipper continued to love it, even after all these years.

“Hey Dipper.” Stan growled, lifting one of his thick, very post wrestling arms up to scratch under the beanie that had replaced his fez to cover his snowy white hair. “Wanna watch some TV? The sequel to ‘The Duchess Inquires: The Duchess Entreats’ is playing in two hours.”  
Dipper tilted a questioning eyebrow towards the screen, where a commercial was complaining about binders that don’t clip all the way shut. Real epidemic, according to the actors.

“So…are you just going to sit here until the movie comes on?”  
The old man blinked at Dipper, his sharp blue eyes (though they be the only thing that had remained sharp in his old age) looked to Dipper, then to the screen again.  
“It’s….it’s been a slow day. Ever since Soos started running the Mystery Shack with his girlfriend.” Stan paused to shake his head in disbelief. “Soos. A girlfriend.”  
“They’ve been dating for like, two years, Grunkle Stan.”

“I know but still. Soos. Soos got a girl to like him. A living, breathing girl. Without any bribes or hostage situations involved. Huh. Shows what I know.” Stan said with a final shake of his head as he downed the last of his cola and proceeded to crinkle it up into a metal hockey puck against his skull and threw it, Frisbee styled into the recycling bin at the other end of the room to join its collected hockey puck brethren in congregation.

“As I was saying, ever since Soos and his….girlfriend. Seriously, the last girl he dated was an actually computer virus. And the girl before that was in love with the personality of a pig. I just….anyway. Since those two took over the Mystery Shack and since Ford and I came back from monster hunting things have been slow. Not a lot to do, you know?”  
“Maybe you could take up golf or something. Or maybe Soos’ abuelita will want to hang out, you know retired person to retired person?”

Stan’s brushy caterpillar eyebrows shot up until they disappeared under his beanie as his eyes slide over to where Abuelita was busy vacuuming the side of the fish tank where Mabel’s lobster had reproduced and was now forging a formal matriarchy. At least that was what Mabel claimed. Abuelita was a sweet, soft-spoken woman, whose demeanor never seemed to waver beyond her constantly pleasant smile. If she knew that she was being addressed, she didn’t acknowledge it and continued to hum to herself something that Dipper thought sounded suspiciously like AC/DC but couldn’t be sure, having only experienced the band via Robbie.

Stan looked back at Dipper with an incredulous look that seemed to ask if Dipper was joking. Dipper shrugged haplessly and turned to head out towards the gift shop. As he left he could hear Grunkle Stan addressing Abuelita.  
“So...you’re....you’re old. How’s that working out for you? I mean that is to say I’m old too, we’re both old. Just two old prunes in the same can, I guess....sigh....you know any card games?”

The gift shop was the same as it ever was, save for the Stan bobble heads had been moved to the vintage shelf and were selling for twice as much. Dressed in the three piece suit and fez was Soos and accompanying Wendy in her typical cash registering duties (that is to say, doing them for Wendy) was Mandy, Soos’s girlfriend.

“Step right up and witness, the fearsome, the terrible, Jackal-raptor!” Soos exclaimed with a dramatic flourish Stan would have been proud of, unveiling a taxidermy spectacle that made Dipper jumped slightly and found that he was actually quite thankful for the fact that it wasn’t real, however well done the stitching were. It was basically the taxidermy body of coyote with vulture wings stitched on its back. And the fact that it was stuck in mid leap with its teeth barred in a frozen snarl didn’t help.

“Man, Soos that thing is...kind of disturbing to be honest. Whatever happened to the Cornerella? Or the Snow White and the Seven Gnomes?”  
Soos turned and at the sight of Dipper, his face lit up like a firefly, as though it were some sort of constantly delightful surprise to have the Pines family living in his house. 

At first, when his Grunkles had come back from their adventuring, they’d been thinking about taking up residence in Abuelita’s old house, now vacant, but the new Man of Mystery wouldn’t have it and insisted the Pines spend the summer in their old home and though it was a little more crowded now, Dipper couldn’t help but be eternally grateful.

“Oh, how’s it going, not-so-little-dude. You don’t like the new attraction? Yeah, it is a bit too spooky. It’s for the new crowd that’s rolling in with that creepy circus that came into town last night out of nowhere. You gotta know your audience in order to be a good businessman. That’s what Mr. Pines always told me. Therefore, Cornerella and Miss White will be in the back until the kid tours come back.”

“Though I’m prone to agree with Dipper, our new exhibits might be going a bit too far on the scary side, Soos.” Mandy put in, leaning up against the bear toothed beaver with that smiling casual manner that had always made her wonderfully likeable in Dipper’s books.  
“Fear is good, Mandy. It’s what this new crowd wants, to be spooked.”  
“It’s turning us into a haunted house. That’s not what the Mystery Shack is about.”

As the two fell into playful bickering with one another about the nature and scope of the Mystery Shack (one of their favourite topics), Dipper caught Wendy’s eye. She flashed him a typical Wendy smile, all fiery eyed and mischievous that made him confirm why he had spent so long crushing over her two summers ago. He smiled back at her and she lifted her phone screen so he could see the picture Mabel sent of Circus Gothica.

“Hey Dipper, am I reading this right? Mabel wants to go to a Goth Circus?”  
“Handsome acrobat flirted with her when she got the flyer.” Dipper explained and Wendy gave a small little snort laugh into her flannel sleeve.  
“Yeah, that makes more sense.”  
“Are you going to go?” Dipper asked.

“Hmmm....” Wendy twisted her lips into a lazy half smile as her honey brown eyes pursued the message before shrugging carelessly. “It’s not really my scene but I’ll go for Mabel. Robbie and Tambrey would love it, though they’d be too ‘cool’ to say so. It might be fun, you never know. Never too early to celebrate Halloween, eh?” Wendy said crinkling her nose playfully as she sent a quibbling message back through her friends’ group chat. Dipper felt his phone vibrate as he got the notification.

“Yeah, I suppose. Every day in Gravity Falls feels like Halloween though.”  
“Like that time we got trapped in that grocery store by ghosts.” Wendy chimed in.  
“Yeah that was horrifying. Or when we watched a shape shifted version of you writhe in green blood.”

“Oh yeah, that one kept me awake for a good solid week.” Wendy said with the casual manner of one who is discussing the weather. “But, I mean...it’d be fun to see what these clowns do to try to scare us. Once you fight a chaos god in an apocalyptic hellscape, nothing bothers you.”  
Dipper laughed, since that was the best way to deal with the horrors that they’d experienced in that torturous week when Bill had run the world. They laughed until their laughter died off and after standing beside each other for a moment too long as they each were absorbed in their own traumatizing thoughts, Dipper shook himself and announced.

“Well, I’m going to just check this with Great Uncle Ford. Make sure nothings...you know....too real.”  
Wendy gave a small little snort as she began to once again flip through her magazine. “Whatever, dude. Don’t sweat it though, if there’s anything you and your sister can handle, it’s the supernatural weirdo stuff that’s attracted to this town like hornets to a rotten apple.”

“Gross. But...um...thanks.” Dipper said, before pulling back the vending machine and with a last wave to Mandy and Soos, disappeared down into the basement.  
The basement’s usual dust and moth-eaten smell clouded Dipper’s nose as he descended the staircase. It was always dark down here since it had no access to natural light and the little light bulbs that were scattered about the staircase was few and far between to leave plenty of shifting shadows free to roam about the corners and shift into horrible dreaded shapes. 

Dipper would never admit that the darkness set his teeth on edge. He was very careful to act as though it was nothing, just the mere absence of light when his parents asked him to go to cellar to fetch a fresh jar of peanut butter or when he and Mabel had to haul the garbage out to the curb at night. He was so careful to make his stiff limbs into a casual look, tried so hard to paint his face with a complacent smile, as though even he could be convinced. 

But in truth, he couldn’t stand the dark, couldn’t stand the faceless shadows that leered at him through his window where the pine trees whispered their night song and the night things howled and shrieked as they went about their nocturnal business. Because he had learned too well what lives in the darkness and what can come from the shadows at the corners of his room. And in his sleep, in the nightmares that had plagued him for years now, his mind ran wild with his fears and the night things always managed to chase him awake, sweating and trembling and muttering nonsense, usually the phrase over and over again can’t sleep, can’t sleep, can’t sleep.

If Mabel was aware of his growing phobias, she was blissfully ignoring them and once again, Dipper was reminded how sometimes Mabel could be the best.  
He never liked the basement for more reasons that the fact that it was dark, the fact that so much had happened down here, so much turmoil, so much distrust, at least throughout the rest of the shack there were fond memories to outweigh the bad, down here not so much.

He found Ford in his study on the second floor of the basement (yes, the basement had three floors and a fancy elevator to match). When the elevator doors opened and Dipper stepped into the elaborate underground study, he stepped on a piece of paper labeled in his uncle’s decorative scrawl ‘Baobab’s and their Ultimate Danger to Humans’.

“Oops.” Dipper hissed unpeeling it from his shoe and looking around at the effects of the tornado that had run through here. Amazing to think that of all the Pines family, Stan was the most organized.  
Boxes were stacked up to the ceiling stuffed with old papers, scales, weights and, in a box marked as trash, was Ford’s old Bill Cipher regalia including a tapestry, a Tibetan idol, African decorative urns and a copy of a Aztec mosaic, all in dedication to the evil triangle. Dipper starred into that venomous slit of an eye and shuddered.

“Grunkle Ford?” Dipper called and there was a smart thump of metal against flesh a little oof.  
“What? No, sorry, no my nephew just walked in....no, no, he’s fine. A good lad, you’d like him. Ha, so you say but I’ve always had my doubts about you.” A six-fingered hand appeared on the underbelly of a machine Dipper knew had once been an encoder of thoughts...before Dipper had broken it and his Great Uncle Ford pulled himself into a standing position. Stan’s older twin brother was the hardened, more stylized twin, in Dipper’s opinion. 

From his brown trench coat always bulging with tools and weapons of Ford’s own make and design (so cool) to the leather satchel where he carried all of his notes in (so cool!), to the glasses with the single cracked lenses that hide his brilliantly blue eyes that possessed an equal amount of depth and shrewdness as his brother. Needless to say, Dipper struggled not to worship his uncle, but how could he not? 

His uncle was an adventuring hero, a man who had spent all his life dedicated to science and research in the field and everything Dipper wanted to be. He grinned and waved at his uncle before stopping himself from looking too eager and Ford smiled and waved back despite the fact that he was talking into a strange devise that was most certainly not a cell phone.

“Yes, yes I’ll send you the blueprints. Though if this ever comes back to me I will firmly deny it, you understand that, right? Though I insist stating my opinion, my friend, that this is dangerous, extremely dangerous and most likely illegal and will most likely result in you getting eaten.”  
There was a beep on the devise that made Ford pull the devise away from his head in time catch sight of the hologram that materialized in the air above the device. It looked like a text message and it was titled only with the words.

I do what I want. So suck it.  
-R.

Ford looked through the hologram at Dipper and frowned.  
“Not funny. My nephew is right here.”  
Another beep, another hologram appeared in the air.

Hi nephew. Be a peach, will you? And tell your uncle to lick my steamy, wet-

Ford threw his hand over the light of the devise to cover up the message.  
“Yes, thank you, you made your point. I’ll send them to you. Just...be careful.” He said the words with a surprising amount of tenderness. There was a pause and the light blinked again, Ford took away his hand to watch the words appear in the air one by one, more carefully this time than the others have been, as though they were bubbling up from some unspoken depth.

Fordy....thanks. If I don’t hear from you again....enjoy the time with your family. You were a good friend. Tell your nephew he’s lucky to have you....goodbye.  
-R.

Dipper watch his uncle read the words, the corners of his blue eyes suddenly misty as he clicked off the device and set it gently on the table.  
“Um....” Dipper said, watching his uncle remove his glasses to rub at his eyes, quietly. “Should I come back?”  
“No, no, its fine, Dipper my boy. Quite fine. I was just...saying goodbye.” The pain in his voice made Dipper indeed wish that he could come back later, he didn’t like to see his uncle like this but in a moment it was gone and Ford was smacking and rubbing his hands together with enthusiasm that seemed almost genuine. “What can I help you with, Dipper?”

“Oh...um...it’s nothing. I was just wandering if...if I could go through some of your notes again for my project.”  
“Ah, yes. An investigation into Anomaly X.” Ford said with a knowing smirk as he walked over to the box heap that took up most of the room. Ford’s attempts at cleaning up this mess, two years and running. “Have you made any headway with the grocery store?”

Dipper shook his head grimly, wrestling down the disappointment that was rising in his throat like bile. “Nothing new on that front. All my research has found is that it’s nothing but a regular grocery store now.”  
Ford clicked his teeth in disapproval as he worked on stacking his arms with boxes from his heap.  
“Isn’t that the worse sort of luck? I always hated it when the abnormal revert back to the normal. It’s such a let-down in my opinion.”

“Right!?” Dipper exclaimed, leaping at the opportunity for someone to vent to. Mabel was usually his first pick for the role but her sympathies could stretch no farther than nodding and mumbling a ‘yeah, that sucks or cool, sounds great’ in accordance to the reaction Dipper was seeking. Ford was much more serviceable in the matter but was hardly ever available for it. 

“Two summers ago, it was a teeming cesspool of supernatural activity. This summer, nothing. Absolutely nothing. I stacked out the grocery store for two nights in a row. I’ve even gone inside the ghost’s old territory and I received no response. And I’m fourteen, a fully fledged teenage now.”  
“Are you sure that teenagers and hooligans was the right obsession for the ghosts?” Ford inquired, “More dormant ghosts can only be roused into activity by their obsession and if you get their obsession wrong they won’t come out.”

“Oh trust me, Great Uncle Ford,” Dipper said, leaning up against the wall and folding his arms in a casual slouch that he had developed specifically for this experiment when he had infiltrated the haunted grocery store but now he was starting to like it. “Teenagers were definitely the obsession of those ghosts. They turned Tyler into a hot dog just because he was being sarcastic. The only thing I could think of is that they’re gone.”

“But where exactly, that’s the question.” Ford said, setting the boxes down before Dipper so that he could scratch his chin contemplatively.  
“Anomaly X, I suppose.” Dipper said, bending down to shift through his uncle’s notes and theories on Anomaly X, the theorized dimension where souls from other worlds collect and wander, souls of things, plants, animals and people, even demons. 

That note had been the thing to catch Dipper’s eye, though he would never admit it to his uncle, even less likely would he admit it to anyone else: the growing fear that perhaps a certain demon of nightmares and chaos had meandered his way into the aimless realm of ghosts to cause who knew what mischief. Dipper knew he shouldn’t care, should be grateful that at least Bill was gone from this current plain of existence but still there remained the nagging feeling that he needed to be sure, that he needed to find Bill before Bill found him. 

Unless Bill was living his afterlife as a smear on some other, more powerful ghost’s shoe than Dipper knew it would only be a matter of time before clever Bill made enough deals and played enough ticks to win himself the title of king of the dead. And that was hardly a title Dipper was comfortable with the demon having. But fretting about what Bill might or might not be doing in another realm of existence was one thing, finding that realm was purely another. In all of his Great Uncle Ford’s traveling, he’d never stumbled upon that particular realm, merely having documented speculations and theories that he had collected over the years. 

Dipper had been digging through them all summer, trying to find a link that would tell him how to achieve connection with, or even travel to this kingdom of ghosts but the only conclusion he could draw was that the only things that could get there were ghosts themselves. So...he just had to catch a ghost, and how hard could that be right?

Turns out, in Gravity Falls weird stuff will push through the cracks of your window panes, sprout like grass between the floor boards, crawl into your bed and whisper goodnight kisses on your eyelashes but open your eyes and it’ll have faded into the shadows again, to taunt and lure and little else.  
“Hmmm...shame.” Ford observed absently. “For your next step in your investigations, I would suggest the cave witch. She might know a thing or two, besides you know how she likes visitors.” 

Dipper shuddered at the memory of the witch’s squirming cave walls crawling with severed human hands that the witch had animated to do her bidding. Her noxious breath of his face, her yellow dying skin and her dead eyes like those of a gutted fish, a pale foggy red that always seemed to find its way to your face and then to your hands, as though she were calculating which she would prefer as a trophy for her collection.

“I hate visiting her, she’s creepy and possibly dead and her pet hands always pinch my cheeks.” Dipper moaned, knowing he sounded like he was complaining but he couldn’t help it. He hated, hated, hated visiting Auntie Witch, a title she insisted being called.  
“Now, Dipper, that’s no way to speak of a lady. Even if she does collect human hands and yes, she may or may not have reanimated her own corpse at one point in time. You can take Mabel for moral support if you wish. Also, if you do go visiting her, make sure to bring a gift.”

“Mabel usually brings her cookies and the latest season of the Bachelor.” Dipper said and Ford smiled, “See? There you go, Mabel is a magician when it comes to making friends. I’ve always told her she should consider a career in politics, I have highly influence ties that she could tap into if she ever wanted to be a diplomat for this dimension.”

Dipper laughed at the notion of Mabel being professional enough to be an ambassador in any setting. “It’d be funny explaining that to our parents. Yeah mom and dad, sorry Mabel can’t come to the phone right now, she’s in a conference meeting with the Squahtar of B-890.”  
Ford smiled too but the mirth didn’t quite reach his eyes and Dipper was stabbed with the realization that his uncle was putting on a show just for him.

“Um...anyway. Do you know anything about a circus?”  
Ford blinked, his bushy eyebrows twisting themselves into a perplexed look.  
“Circus?”  
“Yeah, this goth circus Mabel wants to go to, did you ever write about something like that in your journals?” Dipper asked, holding out the flyer for his uncle to take and examine.  
Ford scratched his chin thoughtfully, his shrewd eye pursuing the page before he handed it back to Dipper with a shake of his head and shrug.

“I can’t remember. This brain’s getting a bit old Dipper. I’ll look through my notes but I don’t recall a circus.”  
“Oh.” Dipper said, feeling the strange sensation of disappointment swell in his chest. So he’d wasted his uncle’s time for nothing. Ford noted Dipper’s moment of melancholy and placed a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll do some research though, Dipper. Not to worry. It’s always important to keep an inquisitive mind, never stop asking questions. But sometimes things just may be exactly what they seem to be and this case, a circus with a gimmick.”

Dipper nodded again and Ford twisted his lips to the side in a very Mabel like fashion. “Here,” He snatched up a coiled notebook and pen from the desk. “Go to the circus and observe what you find there. If there’s anything suspicious, make note and report back to me. No stone left unturned, right?”

Dipper accepted the notebook and smiled up at his uncle in his best attempts to squash his earlier disappointment.  
“Sure thing, uncle.” He said, and now it was his turn to pretend.


	2. The Circus

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi guys! Hope you guys enjoy the next part of my work, feel free to let me know what you think!  
> And in the meantime...have fun at the circus!

Pretend, that’s all it is to them, a show, a petty show that makes them laugh and whoop with delight, clutch at their friends as they shriek at the stuns, at the terror and the thrill. But it is not theirs to feel, only to pity, it is first and foremost mine. It is not as scary as it once was, leaping from on high with nothing but the wind to cradle you, though not enough to soften the blow. Sometimes it is my master’s bidding that I should fall, and I must, as always, obey.

I leap into the air, a cacophony of dramatic music, of black and red hellish lights envelop me, to snag a rope and that gut wrenching feeling as your gravity shifts and you’re careering through the air again only this time you let yourself fall short of the rope, let it slip through your fingers as silently, wordlessly, you fall. And fall, the ground takes forever to reach you, you hear the crowd scream, you can imagine girlfriends and boyfriends clutching at each other in alarm, black sprinkled popcorn and gooey red candy apples frozen half way to pallor lips as they realize this isn’t part of the show, that someone is falling to their death. 

As it always goes. Then, at the last second, at the very last second another performer sweeps in and I’m saved, we spin through the air with a flurry of applause, our hands outstretched in a dramatic flourish as we accept them. I always hate that, the falling. I think my master does that specifically to torment what’s left of me that lies imprisoned inside this shell of a body. Because that little piece still remains, while all else in me has faded and given up to my new fate. The piece that remembers how to fly.

***

The excitement is waiting for us at the ticket booth with open arms and a healthy throng of excited circus goes (most of them teenagers in black clad attire) wait impatiently for the booth to open. But the sign patiently waiting on the ticket booth says We Open at Dusk. There is a restlessness, a growing excitement, summer drifts through the air as the crickets sing, as the sky is scotched with colours of vibrant orange and red. 

The tents are nothing but black canvases against the sky, with frilled lace like spider hangings binding it all together. The scent of freshly buttered popcorn and heated caramel drifts across the field to tantalize the crowd. The blood red flags at the points of each of the tents flutter in the breeze.

Mabel’s smile was beginning to make her cheeks throb but she hardly cared, it hardly mattered. What was pain compared to excitement? What was pain compared to this! Her heart was swimming in her chest, laughter bubbled in the back of her throat as she felt herself basking in the freedom that was this summer evening, coasting on the back of the laughter thrown into the air by the merry company of her friends. 

They were a triumphant lot, in Mabel’s opinion, she could just imagine how they might look. Robbie with his blood red eyeliner and intimidating demeanor (he was truly a softy on the inside) his arm lazily slung across Tambry’s shoulder, who looked devilishly stylish in her bright red and white hair dye. It was Mabel’s suggestion but she was surprised and flattered that Tambry took it. 

Nate and Taylor, the devilish duo were grinning with their usual mischievous nature, their keen eyes taking in the crowd like a pair of trickster gods about to wreak havoc. They coasted on the excitement just as much as she did, they were similar creatures to her, born to ride the wave of energy carried on by others. 

And then there was Wendy, her half lidded eyes and her quiet lazy smile filling Mabel with contentment, like she was sitting next to a warm fire, she loved Wendy. She loved all of her older teenage friends but Wendy specifically held a firm placement in her heart. And then there was Dipper, who looked most out of sorts by this crowd. His hands were dug into the pits of his pockets, his brow furrowed with thought and a frown creasing his face into a look of suspicious annoyance. Mabel smiled at him sweetly.

“Not much longer now, bro-bro!” She said, and Dipper looked up with a guilty sort of fake smile quickly plastered across his face.  
“It better be. These snacks are starting to get itchy.” Thomson mumbled softly before Nate elbowed him sharply in the arm. “Quiet, Thomson. You’ll get us caught!”

Dipper smiled a fake sort of pained look but it was clear he didn’t really want to be there. Mabel tried to think like Dipper, to figure out what would calm his churning mind but there was few things that could shake Dipper into a better mood when he was like this.

“Don’t worry. My search results didn’t pull up anything,” She repeated for the hundredth time.  
“I know. That’s the problem Mabel. I don’t....I don’t trust this.” Dipper said, quietly for fear of being overheard by whatever mysterious phantom Dipper feared might be lurking over their shoulders.

“Don’t worry. We’ll just take a quick little peak around...” Mabel said, her heart already in a teasing flutter at the thought of who exactly she’d be looking for. “Actually, can you hold my place in line for a second, Dip-Dip?”  
“Mabel?” Dipper began as she skipped off, trilling some sort of excuse to find an outhouse. She wasn’t really. No, no. She wanted a glimpse of him before things started. 

She wasn’t sure what she’d say to him, she’d hardly managed anything more than an excited squeak during their last conversation but she was certain she’d get it right this time. She had her lucky socks on (the one’s she’d worn to the unicorn sanctuary) and if in doubt she could bring up her latest knitted sweater: a glittering black thing with a green cartoon ghost on the front. 

Drifting past to where the crowd thinned out to scattered but hopeful onlookers, fluttering with already accumulated garbage, Mabel was beginning to see the flaw in her plan. The fence enclosing the circle was fairly encroaching, not the sort of thing one could easily scale, it was black wrought with artfully speared points at the top. Yeah, definitely couldn’t climb that. 

Beyond the fence, there didn’t seem to be a living soul. Empty pathways between tents where she could distinguish no living person. Perhaps she ought to turn back then....  
Meow. Mabel gasped in delight and scurried over to where a black cat was slinking from under the thick drape of the tent. 

It had a glossy lithe body of black slicked fur coated in white decorative swirls that lined its paws, ears and back in a way that made Mabel assume that someone had taken up the task of painting the poor creature (though which is poorer, the creature or the one who had to paint it?). But it didn’t seem to bother the cat. It looked magnificent and positively regal as it sat by the fence to casually lick its white painted paw.

“Hello, aren’t you just a little king?” Mabel asked, crouching down before the cat so there was nothing but the fence between them to keep Mabel from mauling the cat in snuggles and kisses right then and now. It was so cute, Mabel thought she’d die.

The cat blinked up at her, flashing a pair of startlingly luminescent eyes, they were red like blood and winked with devilish intelligence at her.  
Mabel hesitated as the cat gazed at her, flicking its frosted tipped tail back and forth at her but she knelt and relented to her instincts anyway and held out the palm of her hand for the creature to sniff.

The creature blinked once, sniffed her hand casual and threw her one finger an appeasing lick. She giggled at the scrape of its tongue and gently scratched the back of its white tipped ear.  
“Oh, aren’t you sweet. Have you seen the white haired circus boy, at all? He was handing out flyers this afternoon?”

Mabel wasn’t really certain why she was being so specific with this cat but it seemed the most she was going to get in the way of customer service until the sun went down. The cat blinked at her once, twice and then turned on its heels and trotted back into the tents. Mabel started after its artful form with a wave of disappointment. She stood just as the ticket booths doors finally opened.

A thin gust of air billowed over the crowd, silencing them in hushed excitement, wondering if somehow the wind had blown the doors open on their own accord. No assistant rushed forward to correct this, nor did the doors swing shut again, they simply hung there open and for a moment no one dared move or even whisper. No one had noticed the closed sign had been removed and replaced with another sign written in the same simplistic scrawl.

General fee: $13.00  
Groups greater than three: $10.00 each  
Place your money in the bowl and enter  
We will know if you do not

The crowd looked between each other before the pluckiest, bravest or the ones pushed forward by their friends came first and dropped their coins into the waiting bowl. As soon as the first customer’s hand was drawn back, the bowl was filled with roiling tongues of red flames. The crowd gasped and the first customer let out a curse as red flaming sparks scattered over the crowd like stardust but as quickly as it had come the flames, mesmerizing and shaded to the colour of rubies, fell back again to reveal the modest wooden bowl, now empty. 

The crowd surged and giggled with delight, dropping their coins and their cash into the bowl and watching the flames engulf them to vanish. Mabel blinked and smiled, thinking that perhaps it was a trick more flamboyant than Stan’s old money bag of mystery. She came up to Wendy and Dipper just as their friend group was coming to the door.

“Mabel, where’d you go off to?” Dipper asked, Mabel smiled and shrugged.  
“I found the king of cats Dipper.”  
Dipper blinked and she enjoyed his look of confusion, it always made her laugh.  
“Um...good for you, Mabel.”  
Yes, good for her indeed. Though it would have been better if she’d met the acrobat instead.  
Inside the iron gates, there was...nothing. And no one.   
It looked deserted, more like a ghost town than anything. Stalls of gooey candy and puffy cotton candy, clouds of black sprinkled popcorn and an assortment of chocolate dipped goods ranging from fingers to mice all gleamed behind glass shelves to taught and lure. Tent doors flapped to reveal emptiness inside.

“Well...this is weird. What is this? Some sort of scam?” Wendy asked and Mabel felt her heart surge with disappointment and disbelieve. No, no, surly not. The boy would not have tricked her. Not with a smile like that.  
The crowd was beginning to grumble similar complaints, and if not for the money they’d paid at the door, many would probably have been gone by now.

Well that and the box that was waiting for them when the crowd ambled into the courtyard. It was a magnificent place, twisted with bushes of silver leaves and violet flowers that gave no aroma, that couldn’t be alive but were twisted into such a way that they could have been. In the center of the square was a looming metal tree that fanned out and shaded them from the navy with delicate golden leaves that shimmered and fluttered as though they were alive, as though they strove to imitate the stars themselves. 

Sending the metal leaves a glitter in this imitation garden were candles that flickered and glowed in the tree top branches like Christmas lights, their glow reflected in a thousand metallic leaves and when the wind blew the candle flames fluttered but were never extinguished and made the whole clearing seem to ripple, throwing the shadows into an eerie, lifelike dance.  
At the base of the tree stood a table of velvet cloth, on the table was a box of plated stained glass, blues and greens and golds. Beside the box stood a note, again the same simplistic scrawl.

Open Me and Witness the Wonders that Wait for you Inside

Mabel grinned, her senses tingling with delight, her eyes shining as she already took a step forward to be the lucky one who got to open the box.  
Dipper grabbed her hand.  
“Um...no.” He said firmly. She gaped at him, what was wrong with him? Didn’t he realize something amazing was inside that box?

“The last thing that invited someone to do something here burst into flames.” Dipper pointed out, making Mabel twist her mouth in annoyance – as if this place was merely a one trick pony.  
Besides, at the base of the table, there lounged the King of Cats, casually licking its paw as though the crowd that had immerged from between the tents was nothing special to it.

Mabel rolled her eyes and darted forward, pushing through the crowd who was still looking between themselves, wondering who among them would be the one to see what lay inside. That would be Mabel. She stepped up to the box and paused to grin at the King of Cats, who blinked up at her with steady blood red eyes before looking away. So she turned her attentions to the box.

My, what a piece it was, this close she could see the veins of patterns on the panes of glass, painted in such intricate detail Mabel could have studied it with a microscope. It looked like it was depicting some sort of dance, Mabel could almost see the movement twisting the glass, the spine of skirts and coat tails, the clinking of glasses, the bubbling of champagne, the strumming of the violin’s string, the beating of drums, the roaring of trumpets, all seemed encased in those tiny panes of colourful glass and separated by a metal framework. The clasp that held the box shut was shaped like a cherub with plump little silver cheeks, looking like he was biting down on the clasp to hold it in place. 

Mabel could feel the eyes of the crowd behind her, could practically feel her brother’s annoyance and disappointment like a drill in the back of her neck. She didn’t care, a smile curled over her lips as she flicked the latch out of the cherub’s mouth and threw back the lid.  
‘Let the party begin’ Mabel thought.

And began, it did.  
At first Mabel thought that she’d broken it, for all the walls of the box collapsed. They tumbled and unfolded out from each other, and continued to do so, unfolding and folding so Mabel had to step back for the glass had folded off the table and was spreading onto the courtyard lichen ridden flagstones. 

She gasped as the walls folded themselves into tiers and folded until they touched and collapsed until what stood before Mabel was stain glass formed to look like a wooden door with soft hues of brown and a dark golden glint for the doorknob and even a little blue window that seemed to glow. Then the door burst open with a gust of wind and a flurrying swarm of bats that squeaked and howled into the night overhead poured out like a black cloud. Then out stepped from the door what Mabel had to assume was the ringleader, for what else could he be? 

He was a pale man, with a bald head that gleamed like a freshly peeled hardboiled egg. He wore a little bowler cap with a red feather that made him look almost clown-like. His lips were painted red and a gem glinted on his earlobe, his eyes were rimmed with kohl and when he smiled he did so with a wicked glee. His clothes were of a splendid red coat that trailed the ground, coated in rich golden bangles and bobbles that tittered when he moved like a flock of birds. 

In his hand he held a blood red cane with a clear glass orb on the pommel that was fanned by a pair of bat wings. He was spectacular and horrible at the same time and Mabel struggled with fear and fascination as she stared at him.

“Thank you, my dear for freeing me.” The man said with a wicked smile in Mabel’s direction that sent of tremor of fear up her spine. “Now that our brave guest of honor has released us, the party can truly begin! Welcome, welcome one and all to the magnificent, the mysterious Circus Gothica!” His voice was amplified for his last words as he held his cane above his head and waved it in a circle like he was summoning the clouds and suddenly the circus came to life.

Laughter, wicked and cruel crackled through the air, lights not just in the tree but everywhere in every tent and booth stall suddenly sparkled with a million fairy lights. The sound of rides starting up with a titter of music and crunch and wind of mechanism somewhere, the scent of food and crackle of smoke billowed through the tents and then there were the performers. They seemed to melt from the woodwork, spilling from the great tree to dance in the branches, unfolding themselves from impossible hiding places, under chairs, behind doorways. 

One man even managed to pull himself from a glass display of cotton candy, though he did so with the seamless effort of one buttoning his shirt. They laughed, they juggled, they carried with them sparklers to twirl and hoops to jump through, tigers to ride and ropes to spine on. They were dressed each in glittering costumes of red and black, with sharp painted faces that leered down at Mabel. Many of them seemed to have taken a liking to painting their skin green, their eyes red and their hair ebony black. 

They grinned like demons but they played music, they sang and danced and delighted with the grace of angels. They were a whirl of colour, grace and music and the crowd cheered and gasped and clapped their hands in wicked delight at the sudden onslaught of magic.  
“Enjoy my guests, be horrified, by mystified, whatever you are and whatever you do, enjoy!” 

The Ringmaster cried and the crowds cheered and clapped, delight striking across their faces as their eyes carried them from spectacle to spectacle. Mabel combed the performers for one boy but saw none and combed the crowd for another boy and found him instantly. He was staring at her with a mixture of fear and annoyance, apprehension and trying not to show it. So basically, a quick summary of every look he had ever thrown to her in their short existence together. 

Mabel smiled and waved at him as she took a step to join her brother and her friends but a hand was placed on her shoulder that stopped her. She looked up and saw that same mischievous glint in those kohl rimmed eyes, only now directed to her.  
“Now, now, my prized guest of honor, leaving so soon?”

“Oh, um....well, guest of honor seems a bit much, don’t you think?” Mabel asked shyly.  
“Not at all, it is the tradition of my circus to reward those who display such amiably qualities of bravery.” The Ringmaster smiled in a way that did not match his eyes. It felt like a smile that he had learned in a book, a cold calculated imitation of what kindness ought to look like. Then he straightened and waved his cane as though he were summoning something from the tree where now a thousand performers twirled through hoops and swung on ropes as they scurried from branches to branches, from the glittering throng of music and delight descended a single bird on fluttering black wings.

Or at least, Mabel thought him a bird, until he landed with a light tap of his soft white dancer’s shoes. He wore a fresh attire from the one Mabel had seen him in this afternoon, a costume of pure black with stitched sashes of silver crossing his chest. He wore a jacket as like one belonging to a three piece suit, swallow tailed and all. White gloves with the colour and sparkle of snow with the fingers removed so that his delicate rosebud fingers poked through. Mabel thought she would have fainted as the mysterious acrobat boy smiled at her with recognition.

“Allow my boy here to be your personal guide to our circus. He will show you and your company to all the best, the spectacular and private displays.” The Ringmaster said with a playful grin but Mabel wasn’t listening. The acrobat was smiling at her, his legs slightly crossed as though he were preparing for a dance, his one hand behind his back and the other politely extended to her. His eyes glimmered that soft ruby shade of red shared by all performers here, though his skin had not been painted green and his hair was a frosty shade of pure snowy white. 

The only decoration on his face was the kohl that lined his eyes similar to the Ringmaster’s, but somehow Mabel liked to think he wore it better.  
“Um....” Mabel choked out the words, as she realized that both Ringmaster and acrobat were still waiting for her response. “...O...OK.” She took his hand; it was cold like ice but curled around her hand with a soft tenderness as though her hand were made out of rose blossoms. 

He smiled, a soft, coy little smile and brought her hand to his lips. The touch of his pale pink lips on her knuckles made Mabel think she would die, right here and now in front of everyone.  
Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a flurry of red silk and a twinkling of golden bangles but when she turned her attentions towards the Ringmaster she gasped at the empty place he had occupied a moment ago.

“Don’t worry about that.” The boy said, reading her thoughts. “He did step out of an empty doorway.” He nodded to the stain glass door that Mabel had created by the opening box, now closed and closed to everyone despite their best efforts to open the door and laughing when they failed and taking pictures beside it and regular crowd like things.

“Mabel.” A voice said and she turned to see Dipper, Wendy and the rest of them marching towards Mabel and her new friend. Dipper frowned, looking between Mabel and the boy before Mabel realized that they were still holding hands and quickly snatched hers out of the boy’s, his fingers curled slightly as she did so, a faint fight to keep her hand that made her secretly reel.

“Dipper! I’m the guest of honor!” She cried, the title exciting her now that the Ringmaster was gone. “And look what my prize is!” She tried not to squeal as she gestured to the boy, who bowed to their group.  
“I’ll be your guide for tonight.” The boy said, as cool and as collected as a something from a Victorian novel.  
Dipper frowned and folded his arms across his chest.  
“Thanks, but I think we can find our way around a couple circus tents.”

The boy straightened and flashed her brother a smile that wasn’t quite sweet and most certainly wasn’t quite safe.  
“Oh, are you quite certain of that? Circus Gothica is a place of many marvelous secrets.” His red eyes flashed like two twin tongues of fire, they seemed to scorch the air around him and Dipper scowled at its intensity.  
“Uh-huh. What did you say your name was?”

“I didn’t.” The boy said simply and with a quick glance over their small assembly, motioned with a sweeping gesture that they should follow him. “Please, come with me. The night is young and there is much to see in the circus.”  
Mabel grinned as the boy offered his arm to her, she looked back at her other friends, caught in a mix of suspicion, dislike and (in the case of Wendy) a small, knowing smile that coaxed her on. 

She caught sight of Dipper, looking as displeased as their Aunt Celia discussing the horrors of pot. She did wish Dipper would lighten up. She giggled, she grinned, she waved and she let her own personal tall, handsome stranger lead her into the throng.  
“So what is your name?” Mabel asked, watching the whirl of colours as they drifted from music pool to music pool, no two songs seemed to clash but were spread out just so that one flowed delicately into the other. A ceaseless wave of merry music that they road upon.

“Whatever you want it to be.” The boy replied simply. “For this evening, I am yours.”  
Mabel blinked, stifling a squeal as she gazed up at him, he was at least a good few inches taller than herself and she was struggling to keep the stars from filling her eyes. It was difficult. His jaw line was smooth and angled; his eyebrows dark lined despite his hair, making her wonder if it had been dyed. Which struck her as strange, since most of the actors’ hair was black. 

He varied from the rest in odd ways but fell in line with them in others. Like his eyes, for example, the shade of blood but they were so natural looking, she couldn’t detect any thin line on the white of his eyes to give away the fact that they were contact lenses.  
“Um...alright....so I get to pick out your name for you?”  
“If you’d like.”  
“Oh....alright...Damien?” She didn’t know what she picked it, but it struck her as suiting, a tall mysterious stranger deserved a sly name, starting with a D. Darcy might have been too much of a giveaway for what she was going for.

The boy blinked, his one eyebrow raised as something unusual flickered over his demon eyes. Up till this point they’d been relatively cool but now they flashed with unusual brightness that crackled and sparked behind his carefully controlled face.

“What? Is that actually your name?” Mabel asked, overwhelmingly pleased that she may have actually gotten it right on the first try.  
The boy paused for a moment, staring off into the distance with those crackling, sparkling eyes before it seemed he even took a moment to register her question and when he looked down at her again, the crackle, the spark, the cherry bomb thrown into his otherwise steady fire, evaporated and his smile for her was as cool and calculated as ever.

“It is for tonight. What is your name?”  
“Mabel. It rhymes with table and gable and...smabel.” Mabel rambled, hoping for a laugh. Laughter is what she always went for, what she always liked best in a conversation. But the boy didn’t laugh, only gazed at her steadfastly and smiled that cold remote smile that seemed meager in comparison to the spark he had displayed a moment ago.  
“Charmed.”

Mabel was not. She felt her smile diminish along with her enthusiasm. She wasn’t sure what was inside him but at the moment she could see him only as an empty, pretty shell. She hated those.  
As though sensing her disappointment, the boy added, with a smile that was softer and a voice that was tenderer.  
“Here, we have our first stop for the evening. I have a feeling you might like this.” He opened the tent flap for her and the others of her friends falling behind the pair of them like a loyal train. Mabel tried not to blush as she was forced to drift close to the creature before entering the tent.

Inside, a trio of acrobats spun through the air on cords that shimmered silver like spider’s silk, with a distinct lack of netting in order to catch them. Mabel felt a small gasp escape her throat as she watched the dancers twirl through the air with a recklessness as though gravity was something to laugh at. The crowd whooped and cheered as the bright green shimmering darts shot through the air like comets, catching one another only to betray their fellow and drop them again.

It was an act, she realized after the first couple heart stopping pranks as the trio of acrobats grinned menacing grins at one another. Unlike usual performances, it seems that the trio were not in co-operation but instead were trying to kill each other. Trusting hands were let loose to the wind, vital ropes were severed by overly dramatic silver scissors, waving acrobats were pushed off their platforms by their fellows in costume, only to catch themselves last minute by either a secondary well placed rope or another acrobat trying to play sides.

Mabel laughed and gasped along with the rest of the crowd as the boy- Damien- gently coaxed her closer towards the show with gently touches on her elbows and wisps of graceful fingers on her shoulders that made her shiver.   
“Are you ready?” He asked, his voice a puff of cold air on her ear. She looked up at him and saw that cool, calculated smiled cross his lips. 

“For what?” She asked, and in answer his one had wrapped tenderly around her waist, the other was held high in the air and he whispered the words, soft and inviting and full of something else, the fringed ends of excitement.   
“To fly.” 

Then one of the acrobats swooped by and snatched Damien’s waiting hand, hoisting him artfully out of the crowd and Mabel to her mixed horror and delight was hoisted up after him. A gasping laugh rippled out of her lips, her stomach dropped to her toes as the ground sunk away from her, Damien’s hand on her hip a constant comfort without so much as pinching her skin, like his hand wasn’t holding her up but keeping her from flying away entirely. She felt weightless, she felt free, she was flying!

She looked up with a grin at Damien, watched his cold, distant expression as he held on to the acrobat’s hand as they spun in a graceful arc over an ooing and awing crowd. His face was cold and desolate but his eyes were doing that thing again, they crackled and glowed with life, with daring, with some sort of desolate delight and it puzzled Mabel as to why he would hide such beautiful emotions? They swooped over a group of faces she recognized, her brother, Wendy and Robbie, all wide eyes and gaping mouths.

She beamed and waved at them as the rope dipped suddenly and Mabel and Damien lost speed and altitude with such graceful dissention that Mabel felt like they were weightless birds being gathered out of the air, being set down without so much as a jostling.   
“That…that was amazing!” Mabel squealed, leaping out of Damien’s arms to jump about on the spot because how could one be expected to contain herself after such an exhilarating thing as that? “Dipper! Did you see? Did you see?” 

“Yes, I saw!” Dipper growled, storming up to Damien with lightning flashing in his eyes.   
“What do you think you were doing? Swinging my sister through the air without so much as a net? What if she had slipped and broke her neck? Or one of your buddy acrobats had cut your rope?”   
Mabel could tell Dipper was fuming, his one eye was twitching just slightly as he got very close to Damien’s cool and overall collected face. His bright red eyes, now carefully subdued, remained casually lidded. 

“She was with me. She wasn’t going to fall.”   
“And that’s supposed to comfort me? Some host you are.”  
Then a smile curled the edges of Damien’s lips, that cold, dangerous smile that made Mabel’s heart skip a beat and she wasn’t exactly sure why.   
“What’s life without a little fear? This way, most honored guest and company, there are plenty of other displays to see.” 

That was the biggest understatement of the year, in Mabel’s opinion. Displays was a poor term for the wonders that there were to beheld in each tent; knife thrower with spacers stretching their skin to absurd lengths so that their comrades could aim around and through them, fire dancers that spun through clouds of green, purple and black flames, jugglers of bright glowing spheres in the pitch darkness, dancers that paraded in a plumage of design like ashy peacocks.

There were spiders nests to climb through, and rooms of bubbles to giggle and float through (yes, actually float! Damien blamed it on a formula similar to helium that lingered in the air), there were halls of shadow puppets that danced on the tent walls with the owners of these shadows nowhere to be found. These laughing shadows framed by a mysterious golden light bowed when Mabel entered and commence to tell a story about an imprisoned knight and the princess that had to rescue him, the harpies she had to slay with arrows that shot through the tent wall, through the air before diving back through the opposite tent wall and pinning another harpy in its place, the dragon she had to fight that burned a whole through the tarp so that they could see the outside world beyond but not the puppeteers or even the puppets in sight. 

There was a tent of magicians that folded assistances up into impossible boxes before turning them into a dove and made spiders swing down from their brandished arms like currents of gossamer silk. It was in this tent that the King of the Cats seemed to dwell, most of the time he spent lounging at the magicians feet, licking its patterned paws but occasional it performed a trick, like jumping through hoops or being cut in half and then reforming again. It seemed bored by the whole affair. 

There was a tent for swordsmen, dressed as pirates, who put on a daring swordfight show that spanned over several tight ropes high above the audiences heads. And again, lacking those pesky nets.   
Outside every tent was stalls and stalls of delicious looking treats, which were handed to them without the need for payment, just a smile and a nod and the phrase ‘for the guest of honor and company’, rich gooey caramel treats, chocolate and ice cream, popcorn and peanuts and every treat there was to be offered, though to be honest Mabel felt hesitate at taking free food from bright green men and women. 

It struck her as something that Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz might find less than favorable.   
There were rides to go on that made you shriek and laugh, spin to fight against heaving up your lunch and quiet ones that would sit you up atop the circus in all its dazzling display and let you marvel at it. 

Mabel couldn’t remember a day she had had so much fun and through it all there was Damien, making it all the grander. He lead her through tents just as the crowds legged in them so that there was never need to fight for elbow room and never a need to stand in line. Some tents seemed to be completely private and not open to the general public at all, like the tent full of mirrors that depicted different versions of Mabel, not just warped images but images where Mabel was dressed in Renaissance attire, where she was playing a violin in some tavern while dressed as a…pirate? There was one where she was dressed in Gideon Gleeful’s clothes and putting on a show in the Tent of Telepathy (weird!), one where she was a mermaid with a shimmering hot pink tail and gills were her ears had been (weirder!). 

Damien knew which treats were the best, which performers were the most daring and which displays were the most wonderful. He led them away from the more scarier tents that he doubted they would like, like the tent that housed a collection of medieval torture tools where actors were laid out on tables and trained to scream in agony when you twisted this knob or that knob (completely fake, Damien assured them), or the tent where severed heads sang a quartette (also completely fake, though Mabel wasn’t sure why they needed reassurance on something so obvious). 

There was also the tent that was designed to look like a haunted forest where pale holograms of ghosts wandered aimlessly and moaned, and Damien said with a rather sad smile that it was best to avoid that tent. When he wasn’t leading them from one tent to the next, he kept company with the group in the most pleasant of manners, he was graceful in his etiquette and soft spoken in all his refrains and, he made a point to remain mostly by Mabel sides. And Mabel couldn’t say she minded much, he rode next to her on the rides and she clutched his arm when things startled her and swatted his shoulder in his excitement when she was thrilled, none of which he seemed to mind. He didn’t eat the treats she offered to him, nor did he seem as much amused by the spectacles as Mabel’s reactions to them. 

For she could often see him studying her face out of the corner of her eye, in fact the only time he seemed to willingly leave her side was to disgust in quiet tones with green skinned actors something that seemed very urgent.   
Craning her ear she couldn’t make out what they were saying, in fact she couldn’t even really detect words at all. The language as she could make it out sounded like the whisper of wind in between the tree branches, the rustle of leaves of a cold autumn night, a hissing and creaking and ominous shudder that made Mabel wish she hadn’t heard them talk at all. When she asked if Damien knew a second language, he only blinked at her in confusion. 

Dipper didn’t like him, that much was overly obvious. Even when Damien escorted Dipper to a tent entirely comprised of shelves and shelves of books about the supernatural, the strange, the otherworldly, Dipper only blinked in awe, looked between Damien, the books and Damien again before grumbling something about how this didn’t make them even before settling himself into one of the bean bag chairs and saying he could be left here for the rest of the night. Mabel’s face hurt from smiling, her hand was warm from where it continued to hold Damien’s and her stomach ached from one too many treats. 

“This is amazing.” She said, very late into the evening while she drank hot chocolate on a bench on the outskirts of the center tree’s pavilion. The others of her group where fitfully enjoying themselves in a tent that invited participants to open any of their hundreds upon hundreds of boxes to find out what lay inside. As she watched Thomson opened a box that apparently contained less than friendly contents because he gave a high pitched scream that made the others burst into laughter. “Is this what it’s like every night?” 

“No,” Damien answered, leaning back against the bench. “Sometimes we have dancing mice but the cat has been terrorizing them so they’re off the listing for now.”   
“You mean the magician’s cat? That regal, beautiful thing? Surely he’s not a mouse killer.” Mabel gasped, horrified, to which Damien shot her one of his amused, charming smiles.   
“Did I say killer? No, no, he knows better but he does like to play with them too often than not.”   
Mabel laughed and leaned against the bench as well. 

“I love it here. You’re so lucky that this is what you get to do every single night. It’s magical!”   
Damien paused and said nothing for a long time before replying, in a soft voice barely loud enough for Mabel to hear.   
“Not every night.”   
Mabel frowned at him, not getting his meaning.   
When he caught her staring, he seemed to shake himself out of his thoughts and pressed on.   
“Tell me about you. You live around here?” 

“Just for the summer. I’m staying at my Great Uncle Stan’s place. The Mystery Shack, it’s like a down graded version of this place, you should see it.”   
Damien blinked. “I’d like that. What do your uncles do?”   
“Oh well they-” Mabel began but stopped short before looking over at Damien with a puzzled expression. “Who told you I had two uncles?”   
Damien’s eyes widened for a moment, his pale pink lips parted but another voice spoke instead.

“Ah, there you two are. And how are you enjoying the spectacle, my dear?”   
She turned and looked up into the eerily grinning face of the Ringmaster. She tried not to shudder as he leaned in close.   
“Oh, well. It’s beautiful…wonderful…amazing!” Mabel answered with sincerity. “The most fun I’ve had all summer.” 

“Glad to hear that, glad to hear that. The last act of the night will be starting soon in the main tent; my boy here will be performing in it actually, if you’d like to watch. Now, shouldn’t you be getting ready?” He said to the boy, waving his staff casually in the boy’s general direction. Damien stared for one blank moment at the Ringmaster, at the orb framed in its blood red bat’s wings before he stood and with a final nod and a weak smile to Mabel, followed the Ringmaster towards the largest tent.

Mabel blinked; stunned at having been so quickly deprived of her newfound friend, she watched the Ringmaster and Damien walk slowly away, one of the Ringmaster’s hands snagging Damien by the elbow. Mabel stood and sent a quick text to the others of her group, informing them that she’d be in the main tent for the final act of the evening if they wanted her before heading at a quickened pace after the Ringmaster and her friend. Mabel wasn’t like her brother in many ways, she didn’t feel a constant suspicion about people and things, she loved people freely and easily, which was why she felt a protective connection to her new best friend and the way he had glanced at her when the Ringmaster guided him away made her anxious. 

As she snuck around the stalls, trying to casually lick caramel off her fingers while she watched the two figures slowly round the folds of the tent. Mabel willed herself another step closer and another before a soft meow made her startle with a little yelp (oh, so casual) and turning around to blink down at the King of Cats gazing steadily back at her with royal crimson eyes. 

“What?” She asked the cat, trying not to seem too haughty and indigent at being caught, trying her best to remind herself that it was, indeed, just a cat. “I’m not doing anything.” She answered its unasked question anyway because she could feel its eyes boring into her. Its tail flicked back and forth across the gravel in annoyance. 

Twisting her lips together into a grimace, she turned away from the cat just in time to see the tip of Damien’s swallow tailed coat disappearing out of sight behind the big tent. She trotted after them, the cat close on her heels, though she couldn’t shake off a silly suspicion that it aimed to get either get her in trouble or to see how things will play out. She shook herself, trying to not let her imagination get ahead of her as it usual did. Cats didn’t have opinions on matters that didn’t involve food and sprawling places to sleep. They weren’t like Waddles, after all. 

Peering around the folds of the tent where crates were stacked and ropes were exposed and the magic of the circus ebbed to scattered bits of trash and the distant voice of music, she could see the Ringmaster and Damien conversing. Or at least…the Ringmaster was conversing, in quite an animated fashion actually, his limbs waving themselves about like a puppet whose master doesn’t quite have full control over its strings, the staff came close to Damien’s face a few times and every time it did, Damien’s eyes followed it. 

Damien on the other hand, said nothing, did nothing, his face remained slack and completely devoid of emotion as the Ringmaster spoke, occasionally his eye ruby eyes blinked but beyond that there was nothing to tell that he was even alive and not just a beautiful boy carved from wax.   
When the Ringmaster paused for breathe Damien spoke, his lips parted for barely a few, briefly words that Mabel could guess couldn’t have ranged beyond a murmur. Mabel took a step forward, straining her ears for even the fringed fragments of the conversation. 

Smack!   
Mabel’s whole body jumped as her hand was brought to her mouth in wide-eyed horror. The Ringmaster was dabbing the back of his hand with a handkerchief and tucking it back into his pocket with splotches of green, while Damien’s head remained snapped to the one side, his hair falling into his eyes, shading his expression as something green gathered in the corner of his mouth where it remained unattended. 

The Ringmaster’s expression never faltered, seamlessly passed into a pleasant demeanor as he slipped on a pair of paper white gloves and slipping with a brandished wave of his coloured coat disappeared inside the tent flap. When he was gone, Mabel rushed forward, running up to Damien from where he hadn’t moved after being struck. 

“Damien!” Mabel said, checking her voice to keep it faint least a curtain was all that separated her and the Ringmaster. It suddenly occurred to Mabel that Damien wasn’t his real name, that it was all just a silly little game he and her had been playing all night and she was sick of it, she wanted his real name, his real company, a real boy who had just been struck. “Are you alright?”   
Damien lifted his gaze to peer at her through locks of snow-white hair, and something in his eyes made her pause, something dark and menacing, something to be feared.

She faltered as Damien stared at her, that dazzlingly green liquid, (at any other time it would have entranced her, it seemed to practically glow a bright Florence green like glowing mouth wash) trickling free from his mouth to tumble down his chin. He didn’t seem to notice.   
“Damien?” She asked, wavering with uncertainty. 

“She shouldn’t be back here.” Damien said at last, bringing one knuckle up to his chin to clear away the trail of green that left a smear like grass stains on his chin, he didn’t look at her, instead he was looking down at…the cat? His royal majesty had perched himself so neatly on into a sitting position as it puffed its chest out as proud as it could be. It seemed un-wavered by Damien’s assault but its tail did throw itself this way and that. 

“Damien…” Mabel said with uncertainty, and reaching out placed a hand on his arm. There was a twitch at his nose as it fought against its urge to wrinkle in disgust as he snatched her wrist with one rough hand and threw it off of him.   
“I don’t have time for your games. I have work to do.” The boy said, his expression as callused as a killer as he gazed down at her with cold isolation. She staggered back, a jab punched straight through her heart. At her wounded expression, the boy who wasn’t Damien, never had been Damien, paused.

His hard expression slacked a moment, his eyes widened and his eyebrows pinched themselves together in a sad, lonely…desolate look that seemed to be pained by his own cruelty. But whatever traversed his thoughts was gone in an instant again, as he turned abruptly on his heels and headed into the tent without so much as a backwards glance. 

Mabel stared in stunned horror at the black canvas of the tent before a soft meow brought her back to life; she looked down into a pair of patient eyes and tried her best to blink back tears.   
“Am I an idiot?” She asked, following the cat as it trotted away around the tent towards the main entrance where a steady line was already gathering. The cat looked up at her but whatever opinions it had, it was keeping it to itself. 

She found Dipper, Wendy and the others in line, her arms wrapped carefully around her waist to keep her insides from tumbling out in a raging torrent of tears.   
“Hey,” Robbie asked, his died black hair falling into his red painted eyes (tears of blood for the occasion), “are you OK?” He placed a comforting gloved hand on Mabel’s shoulder in his best Robbie attempt to be consoling, Dipper flashed Robbie an annoyed look before giving Mabel a soft but oh so horribly pitying smile. 

“The acrobat dude?”   
Mabel nodded miserably, and leaned into Robbie’s skull patterned skirt morosely. Robbie in his affectionate way stroked her brown frilly hair back into place and carefully re-clipped her spider barrettes for her (he had borrowed them off of Tambrey for Mabel) while Dipper tried to his best to be soothing. 

“Don’t worry about that guy, Mabel. He was jerk to begin with. I could tell.”   
“Yeah, he’s too deadpanned for you Mabel.” Robbie added, as cheerful as Robbie in all his angst ever got. Robbie and Dipper didn’t enjoy or agreed about much, and even in her spiraling sadness, Mabel couldn’t help be a little heartened in their united attempts to comfort her. 

“Yeah, all that seriousness weighed down the mood.” Wendy put, using Robbie’s shoulder as a prop for her arm as she leaned over Mabel affectionately. “Don’t give him another thought.”   
But the thing was, Mabel was still thinking about him, feeling sorry for him, struggling over the confusion she felt towards him. Closing her eyes, she could still see him, his head snapped to the side, his hair shading his face, the green liquid trickling from his lips, that apologetic half smile as he left her…She wished and wished so hard it ached that she understood him. 

Inside, they were seated as the guest of honor and her company in the front row. Popcorn and caramel apples were handed off to her and her guests, free of charge but Mabel’s stomach hurt, both literally and emotionally and so she passed off her treats to Thomson to gulp down.   
“Come on, Mabel. Cheer up and just forget about that guy.” Dipper said, placing a comforting hand on her shoulder, she forced a weak smile across her lips but her thoughts remained millions of miles away. The lights dimmed and hushed excited whispers fluttered through the crowd. 

Then a light switch was thrown somewhere and a pillar of light immerged in the center of the ring. The sound of footsteps, the light jingling of bells and the Ringmaster’s form walked onto the stag in such an ordinary fashion. He step into the pillar of light so calmly, so orderly. He paused to clear his throat, brush off his coat sleeves and smiled into the crowd. Mabel shuddered, the pale light drained him of any colour he had in him, making his skin seem to glow and created a shadow in the hollow of his eyes, making them look sunken and almost nonexistent. 

“Ladies and Gentlemen.” The Ringmaster said with a sweeping gesture to the crowd, spreading his arms up to the heavens as if to implore some greater deity. “Have you been enjoying yourself at the circus? Have you been delighted? Amazed? Mystified?”   
The crowd cheered their approval. The Ringmaster’s smile grew feral. 

“Well now, that simply won’t do. We’ll have to fix that, won’t we? Ladies and Gentlemen, for our final act of the evening, prepare yourselves and your company, for things are about to get…weird.” 

Upon the final word, the Ringmaster struck the end of his staff to the ground and as soon as the staff struck the earth, there was colour, like a stone being dropped into a stream, it flowed out from the end of his staff in rich waves. At the same moment the music began, heavy in a beat that matched the Ringmaster’s staff. Each time he brought the staff up, darkness and the echoing of left over music, every time he struck, music and light. The Ringmaster laughed and was echoed by a hundred cackling voices in the rafters. Mabel tilted her head and saw a hundred pairs of glowing red shinning through the darkness, when light crackled across the tent, she saw for a brief second their wicked, catlike smiles.

Each of them held something in their hands, something that glowed, something that was green. Mabel thought it must have been lanterns of some kind but they were too far off to be certain. Then all at once, by the flashing rhythmic lights brought about by the Ringmaster’s staff, the actors all leapt into the air, the lanterns that glowed in their hands leaving trails of wispy of evanescent light like the tails of bright green comets in their wake. 

They spun gracefully through the air, spinning patterns of green light to fill the darkness, they dove and dipped, spun and leaped, Mabel wasn’t sure where the wires or ropes could be found, she couldn’t see any. She strained her eyes for Damien, treasuring the flashes of light to scan the grinning tumultuous cacophony of movement for him but all the faces she could find were green and grinning. 

And between the shifting shapes of the fluttering, birdlike host, was Damien. Or at least…a boy that could be no one else but Damien, for his was the only face not decked in green, his the only hair still glittering a cold desolate silver like a star but oh, it couldn’t be him could it?   
He hovered in the air on invisible strings, a billowing black hooded cloak fluttering around him like a living thing. His eyes burned through the shade of his hood to sear a mark in Mabel’s heart to make it shudder and quake. In his one hand burned a glowing red flame that lapped around his fingertips without the semblance of pain, and in his other hand he held a reaper’s scythe. 

In the center of his cackling, ghoulish assembly that cascaded around him like a flock of grinning birds, it was clear what character Damien was supposed to be playing. Members of the audience shrieked at the sight of him, hovering so ominously in the center ring and indeed, Mabel could scarce withhold a gasp, struggling to remember how she had ever thought such a terrifying creature to be her friend. He drifting downwards in time to the music, landing on dainty pointed shoes on one of the tight rope wires and walking the a wordless grace, his cloak twisting behind in a memorizing display, his eyes continued to burn as he came up to stand over top of where the ringmaster stood. 

A dark menacing smile pricked the corners of his lips, members of the audience shouted out their warning but the Ringmaster didn’t listen, nor did he look up as Damien leapt from the tight rope, light silhouetting his shadow across the tent’s roof, his scythe held high above his head to strike. The audience screamed, the Ringmaster turned at the last second to see the blazing red eyes phantom dropping down on him, there was a final flash of light and then-darkness clouded Mabel’s eyesight and when it cleared the tent was emptied of every green actor, the Ringmaster and Damien. 

As the last ringing note of the music echoed in the ears of the puzzled audience, they blinked and stood, looking this way and that to wonder where over thirty actors had vanished to, having left without so much as a sound.   
Murmuring the strange ending on their way out of the tent, the crowd puzzled over the fact that the circus seemed as desolate as it had been at the beginning of the night, the stalls having closed down, the tent flaps closed with a snap, signs tucked in and entrance mats rolled up, it seemed that as though in that single flash the entire circus had packed itself up and now there was nothing left to do but leave. 

Hanging over the yawning gates was a little sign decked in cobwebs that swung so innocently in the faint breeze. Mabel passed under it just as a strong gust of wind twisted it around so that the words were still facing her as she departed. She shuddered and wrapped her arms around herself, taking up Robbie’s offered sweater as she resisted the urge to look over her shoulder to watch the words staring at her. 

See you soon.


	3. Bad Dreams

That night, Mabel dreamed of the circus. She dreamed that she was walking within the rows and rows of tents but all of them were empty of people, actors and the irregular amusements to be had. Abandoned stalls creaked and sighed in the bone chattering wind, scattered blackened leaves fluttered in the breeze, everything was black and grey, muted and lifeless. In the pavilion the great tree’s metal limbs knocked together in great rattling tones like church bell gongs. Up above the sky was darkened and circled with hundreds of cackling crows. Thunder rumbled to quake the very marrow of her bones, the sky rippled with wicked green lightening. 

Her feet led her to the grand tent where the entrance flap had been abandoned to flutter aimlessly in the breeze, snapping back and forth like a thrashing creature caught in a net. Inside, in the center of the stage’s floor was the boy, brought to his knees, his arms spread before him by a twin pair of chains that shackled his wrists to the two pillars of the tent. 

His head was bowed, his hands slackened while the shackles dug into his wrists, on his shoulders were dripping heavy coils of chains that dressed him like a dwarf in giant’s clothes. He didn’t move when Mabel stepped closer, in fact he failed to acknowledge her presence at all. His chest didn’t move in order to breath and for a moment Mabel shuddered to think that he might be dead. 

“You were a jerk to me today.” Mabel said out loud, for this was, in fact a dream. “I shouldn’t care if you’re dead.”  
At her words the boy opened his eyes and weakly lifted his head a degree or two to gaze at Mabel. His face was tired, oh so tired, his ruby eyes lidded and glazed, his jaw slack and mere force of will seemed the only thing to keep his head from lolling back onto his chest. The skin of his face was badly misshaped, bruised and bleeding in that strange luminescent greenish hue in a way that made Mabel cringe while at the same time struggling against a strange fascination.

It dripped off his face and mingled with his hair in the most pitying of fashions.  
“Mabel…” he wheezed, his voice barely anything beyond a weak imploring breath. “Help me…”  
Mabel frowned, mentally chastising her own fingers for inching from a want to help.  
“Why? I repeat my earlier statement, you were a jerk to me. Besides, this is just a dream, there’s nothing I can help you with from here.” 

“I’m…sorry…didn’t mean to…don’t want to…can’t escape….can’t think…” He gasped, his expression crunched up in pain as he doubled over, each word sounded like it was being pried from his lips, tears leaked from the corners of his eyes to flow down his cheeks in a never ending river and Mabel couldn’t help it, she felt for his pain. She knelt down before him and stroked his cheeks to wipe the tears away in an attempt to be soothing. 

The boy leaned into her hands, the two of them disregarding the green smear it left behind on her fingertips. A small smile touched the ends of her lips; she had wanted such a sweet sincere touch like this from him all evening. Encouraged, she ran a hand gently through his glossy white hair.  
“Hey, there, there. What do you mean? Escape from what?” 

In answer, the boy’s eyes grew suddenly wide, he paused, listening and Mabel heard his breathe hitch in his throat.  
“He’s coming…” The boy breathed the horse whisper and Mabel was about to ask who He was when she heard it, a soft whispered voice that snuck between the joints of her bones, that same creeping feeling she had felt in minor forms at the circus, now amplified here tenfold. She stiffened, too terrified to move as a drifting one note melody, drunken and slurry sloshed it grainy way over a record player somewhere far off, the same tune that had been played during the final act of the circus. 

Followed by the sound of footsteps. She turned and saw his black cape fluttering in the doorway, saw the scythe glint with a dull silver hue in the weak light and through it all there was his eyes, grinning and malicious. Those wicked demon eyes, she took a step back, the boy at her side was whimpering and then the form was flying towards her with a burst of energy, its cape billowing behind him, its scythe raised to slice her in half.

She screamed and kept screaming until she was sitting up in bed, clutching her multi-bear stuffy as she blinked in terror into the stiff and impenetrable darkness.  
“Mabel?” Dipper’s voice croaked, slurred from fresh sleep and stumbling to get his bearings. “Mabel? What happened?” Mabel blinked, waiting for her breathing to calm down, waiting for her heart to stop throbbing but it wouldn’t. 

The darkness was everywhere but why was it still night? Had they not been at the circus until at least the dawning hours? Surly it’d be light by now but it was as black a night as it had ever been and it had been so long since Mabel recalled being afraid of the dark.  
“Mabel, hang on, I’ll get the light.” Dipper said, and for a moment Mabel thought he’d been able to reach for it, but then thought better of it for the light that danced before Mabel’s eyes was a bright luminescent green, the same colour as the lightening in her dream and it seeped into their room from the floorboards. 

In an instant before the light faded again, Mabel saw Dipper sitting up in bed, his hand resting on the light without turning it on, his blank expression fixed on Mabel, his eyes wide and terrified. Then there was only darkness again.  
“What the-” Dipper began but Mabel shushed him into a hushed whisper. 

“What was that?” He tried again, shimmying to the end of his bed as quietly as the squeaky floorboards would allow. The light flashed again, brighter this time, an ominous green that seemed to follow her everywhere now a days.  
“I don’t know,” Mabel answered the half forgotten question as she inched herself off of her bed after her brother, her hand curled slowly around the grappling hook from where it hung on a hook over her bed. 

As she inched towards the door she felt another hand in hers, she looked up at Dipper’s face, all sharp shadowed angles and horrible green light but his smile was purely his, reassuring and warm like a sun soaked stone at her back. She nodded to her brother and together they opened the door and made their slow way down the darken staircase. They made certain to miss the tenth, sixth and third step, for they growled and groaned like zombies, it was a good thing her and Dipper had spent so many summer days trying to sneak up on Grunkle Stan. 

The light was leaking in from the gift shop, dancing across the wall in flickering shapes and darting shadows, brightening and dimming in consistent intervals like a heartbeat. Mabel’s own was fluttering like a hummingbird’s wings inside her chest. Was it Great Uncle Ford? She couldn’t imagine him working at this hour, and not in the gift shop. Unless he was running tests on the lead paint used in the Stan bobble head dolls again. Or the decomposition rate of Soos’ latest taxidermy projects. Again. 

Peering around the corner landing and down the hall through the Western styled door flappy thingy, she could see the sources of the light. Like will-o-the-wisps caught in a hazy green fog, darting little lights fluttered and swarmed over the gift shop, in between the shelves, winking in between the glass jars and creating rippling veins of light to quiver across the ceiling like an odious remembrance of the way light reflects off the water. Mabel shivered, suddenly struck by a chill that seeped in between the marrow of her bones, that frosted her bare toes and made her long for the comfort of her bed. 

“Is that…” Dipper gasped, breathlessly. Mabel looked over to see his eyes alive with fascination, his mouth hanging open while the corners of his lips were just touched with the echoed hints of a smile.  
“What?” Mabel whispered. But Dipper was already taking her hand and inching the pair of them down the hall, their backs pressed against the wall, their breath held tightly inside their lungs. She could hear voices now, whispering in tones that sounded like the whistle through a crack in the window pane on a cold winter’s night, the scuttle of leaves on the pavement in dead November, the creak and crack of ancient ice deep below the water’s surface. Horror hallowed her insides like a jack-o-lantern, she recognized that sound, she recognized the voice that spoke it.

“Find it already and stop with that infernal whispering; you know I can’t understand what you’re saying.” The Ringmaster said, sounding frightfully bored considering the circumstances. It was enough to spike Mabel’s angry, he was breaking and entering into their house, into the Mystery Shack and he sounded like he was struggling to keep awake, as if the people living here could pose no threat at all. 

Mabel was half tempted to walk out there right then and there and show him how much of a threat she was, how much trouble this man with too much eyeliner and not enough sun was in after daring to think he could enter the Mystery Shack uninvited. She took a step forward, hot temper clouding her eyes red but Dipper held her back and violently shook his head, his eyes shinning with meaning. He moved his lips, struggling to mouth something, Mabel squinted at him with confusion. 

“You suck at mouthing words, Dipper.” She hissed before Dipper clapped a hand over her mouth to silence her. Too late.  
“What was that?” The Ringmaster asked, his sleepiness drained from his voice. A pause as Mabel marveled how completely exposed the two of them were. Nothing barred them between their intruders save for a Western styled swinging door thing. She held her breath, she feared her heartbeat would give them away. 

“One of you, go see what it is.” The command in his voice made Mabel forget that she was any sort of threat, that she wasn’t just a scared little girl in her nightshirt, that she had done anything heroic ever in her life. It was like the ice that was in between her bones had managed to seep into her nerves as well, her breath crystalized into mist before her eyes. A green glowing lantern drifted towards the doors. Her mind screamed at her to run but it felt as though she couldn’t move, the ice chilled her blood in her veins. 

The Western doors didn’t move but something stepped through them. Stepped. Through. Them. For a moment his form was indistinct, a hazy mist of a pale greenish glow that floated through the pours of wood, snuck in between the seams of the planks before reorganizing himself, it reminded Mabel of a camera coming into focus. A pair of ruby red eyes that came into focus and locked with hers. 

Her mouth dropped open as she watched his snowy hair drift around him like he was underwater, watched his grim reaper cloak sway in an unfelt breeze, watched the green glowing flame that he held in his hand, untended by anything so simple as a candle or torch or something for the fire to actually hold onto. It seemed content to flutter in the air over the boy’s hand like a florescent jellyfish, hovering there by it’s own whims only, with nothing but the occasional trail of green lightening crackling back to the center of the boy’s palm to suggest the two entities held a connection at all. 

He saw her and her twin brother, frozen as they were to the spot. A pause where the boy’s chest did not rise for his breath and his expression gave away nothing. He was a boy made of stone and she a girl craved from ice. Then slowly, very slowly, he tilted his head slightly to the one side, as though he were looking at a piece of abstract art he didn’t understand and really had no desire to understand. His eyes traveled down their frozen forms, over their bare legs and summer pj shorts, their baggy nightshirts, then back up again to Mabel’s eyes. She tried to fill as much pain as she could into her eyes and it wasn’t hard. Overwhelming betrayal made her eyes dance with spots. Everything starting from the smile he had given her when he had handed her that flyer…

Slowly, pleadingly, though she knew it was useless, she shook her head. The boy’s eyes began to dance with a fire that crackled and popped, sparks practically clung to his eyelashes as for a moment he looked more alive than ever.  
But still he turned and in that same disturbing manner fazed himself back through the wooden door, so he did again to reenter the gift shop. A pause hung in the air.  
“Well?” The Ringmaster snapped with impatience.  
“There’s nothing of interest.” The words made her heart give pause. She reeled, the use of her limbs at her disposal once again, leaving her feeling light and rather dizzy. 

She surely would have slammed right into the fish tank had Dipper not caught and hauled her behind it instead.  
“Nothing of interest?” The Ringmaster demanded in astonishment as her world was forced to reorient itself. “That sounds an awful lot like an opinionative answer than anything else and last time I checked you didn’t have an opinion. I didn’t ask for interesting things, I asked if anyone was back there.” 

A pause followed by another answer, more strained than the last, like the boy was choking on something, like each word from his lips was a battle.  
“There’s….nothing….of interest.” He grinded the words between his teeth before parting with them and even though Mabel had seen him phase through walls and preform feats of spectacular marvels at the circus without even being short of breath, now he seemed positively incapable of gathering enough air into ragged, self-restrained gasps.

She tried to peer through the fish tank, where she saw the hallway in wobbly shades of blue and black, with the occasional green flicker from the orbs. The silence was deafening, the hand in Mabel’s own trembled.  
“I do believe you’re lying.” The words were soft but final, like snow settling over a grave.  
“No!” Choked the boy before he was cut off and a new sound made Dipper and Mabel clutch at their eardrums in pain. It was the sound of the wind howling through the treetops, it was the sound of nails on chalkboard and shards of glass being twisted inside of a wound.

It was agony but it took a moment for Mabel to realize whose agony it was.  
She leapt to her feet, no frost could stand against the fire that flowed through her veins.  
“Mabel!” Dipper cried and he reached for her but she wrenched herself out of his grasp before diving into the room, her grappling hook held aloft. 

“Get away from him!” She screamed. Her eyes grew wide as she hesitated a moment in order to take in the scene before her. The actors from the circus, a good many of them, the man who had ran the Box Tent, the woman who had given her caramel corn at the booth, the acrobats, the tightrope walkers, watched her with blood red eyes and sneering faces from where they hovered a foot or two off the floor, green light unaided by torch or candle wick, glowing and flickering off their hands. 

There stood the Ringmaster, looking bizarrely ordinary despite the scene, his staff held aloft like a threat and on his knees, his head bent and his form somehow blurry around the edges like a smudged photograph was the boy. He tilted his head back to gaze at her, just as he had in her dream, only his red eyes glittered with a different meaning, pleading, begging. Within those eyes she only saw a single word.  
Run. 

She gritted her teeth and wanted to scream at him, at them, at herself, at everyone, ‘have you forgotten who I am?’ She and her brother have faced demons, monsters and ghouls since their childhood. She scared of them? Oh no, it should be the other way around.  
“And what’s this?” The Ringmaster asked, raising an eyebrow to Mabel’s grappling hook and her determined glare, his eyes shining with amusement to make Mabel grit her teeth in fury. 

“A…‘nothing of interest,’ I suppose?” He laughed, throwing a glance over at the silently despairing boy at his feet, before turning away from her and with a casual wave of his hand over his shoulder, he called out, “Take care of her.”  
Around her, red eyes glinted mischievously, sharp feline grins and cackling laughter filled the room. 

The wind picked up, merchandise rattled on the shelves before toppling to the floor or in the case of the lighter objects, pens and papers and little Mystery Shack key chains, were flung into the air to encircle Mabel in her own personal tornado of chaos. Window panes rattled, the tapestries fluttered against the wall, Mabel ducked a sailing mug, which smashed into a thousand pieces over her head, she screamed and dropped rolled to prevent a hail of pencils from skewering her alive. 

“Knew we should have discontinued those.” She muttered.  
A green skinned woman raised her hand like a conductor and one by one the creatures did that blurring out thing the boy had done earlier, and the foggy trails of their essence slipped between the seams of the taxidermy nightmares Soos had been concocting. 

Glass plastic eyes glowed a hellish red as stuffed heads raised themselves up, paws cracked the glue free from their extremities as they stretched and pulled themselves free of screws and bolts holding them to their pedestals. Snarling green foam dripped from their mouths as the horrible hybrids came towards Mabel, their back hair bristling. 

A scream that was much too high to be called manly and much too scared to be called heroic met Mabel’s ears as her brother charged into the room, the wind ballooning his shirt to expose his soft stomach, brandishing a fire poker like a sword as he batted the head of the nearest badger-badger (two heads, twice the price). He paused catching his breath to realize what it was he had actually hit, as he looked about the room at the rest of the mess. 

The man that had run the Box Tent, raised a hand and the empty cardboard boxes sitting in a heap by the recycling bin rose up, glowing a icy blue light before folding and reshaping themselves into sharpened airplanes, their points sailing towards Dipper. With a rough kick to her brother’s lower back that was harder than she intended, her brother went rolling and the cardboard spears embedded themselves in the far wall. 

“What…what…WHAT!” Dipper screamed, getting to his knees, his eyes wide as he searched Mabel’s for an answer.  
“Look out!” Mabel shouted, Dipper turned and raised his fire poker to keep the pirate’s sword (which wasn’t just a play prop after all) from embedding itself in his skull. The pirate creature grinned at him with wicked delight, Dipper scrambling backwards to get to his feet as he desperately fought off the creature’s blows. 

Mabel dropkicked a squirrel thing that sent it flying across the room, but she let out a small yelp of alarm and pain as the Jackel-raptor swooped over her head, slicing its claws across her arm as it went. Out of spite, she grabbed the leg that had clawed her, hoisted it out of the air by sheer strength that Grenda would have been proud of, and smashed against the wall with an animalistic cry of pain that sent the misty creature reeling out of the stuffed beast. 

It blinked for a moment, disoriented before its red eyes came back into focus again. She gasped as its painted fur piled onto its back as it hissed at her, spitting venom.  
“You too!” She gasped as it darted down one of the merchandise aisles and Mabel with a cry of outrage, charged after it. 

“What’s going on down here!?” Thundered a voice she recognized, Mabel look up and saw her Grunkle Stan in his muscle shirt and boxers, his white cottony hair askew, his glasses tilted to the side and a Mystery Shack mug in his hand. His sharp blue eyes grew wide, his bushy eyebrows climbed up and up his wrinkled forehead. For a moment he only stood there, then he raised his hands above his head and burst into an exalted cry of “Yes! Sweet Raison Pumpkin Pie! Yes! Ford, get the harpoon! Abuelita, my brass-knuckles!” Smashing his mug against the doorframe, he leapt with a passionate whoop of delight and drove the jagged handle into the nearest taxidermy glass eye. 

“Stan, no wait! Annnnd he’d gone.” Ford said, coming in after his brother, glasses also askew, dress in the furry turtleneck he used as a pajama shirt and Duck-tective fuzzy pajama bottoms Stan had got him last Christmas. In his hand he held a rusty harpoon.  
“Dipper, status report!” Ford said in that tone he took on whenever he was trying to teach the twins something he thought was important. As Mabel dove behind a barrel of fake painted gold rocks to avoid the flaming blue tongues of a ghost lady while at the same time chasing that treacherous cat, she thought this a funny time for such behaviour. 

“I…uh…” Dipper stumbled, still in the middle of his duel to the death with the pirate. They had made it onto the counter at this point and it seemed like things were not going in Dipper’s favor, as more often than not he had to suck in his stomach or stumble back to avoid spilling his insides all over Mabel’s nicely cleaned counter. Grunkle Stan tumbled passed him in the middle of a grappling match with the Box Man, Stan was laughing hysterically. 

“I…I don’t know, they broke in!” Dipper gasped, leaping off the counter and hacking at the pirates exposed legs. The poker went straight through the pirate as though the creature was made from nothing but mist. The pirate’s eyes glinted gleefully as his shines reattached themselves.  
“Oh, come on!” Dipper cursed before the creature put a boot to his face and sent him rolling head over heels into a rack of Mabel’s handmade sweaters for sale. 

“Dipper, how many times have I told you and your sister? Assess the situation before you engage, that how you beat your enemies. Give yourself a moment or two to find your enemies weakness and to use your environment to your advantage.” Ford said, pausing a moment before hurling the harpoon across the room, where it impaled a coyote-cougar and pinned it to the wall where it continued to writhe in agony. 

“What? Enemies weaknesses?” Stan asked, from where he had the Box Man in a headlock and was currently trying to render him unconscious. It wasn’t working. “What kind of things are you teaching our highly impressionable young niece and nephew?”  
Ford shot his brother an accusing glance.  
“Really Stanley? You’re going to talk to me about being a good role model?”  
Grunkle Stan threw his brother a cocky lopsided grin.  
“Your brass knuckles, Mr. Pine.” Abuelita said sweetly, dressed in a flower print nightgown and her hair rolled in blue curling rods. Her pleasant smile never wavered as dropped them into the man’s astonished hand, her eyes sliding over the scene before her and then she turned and muttered something about calling the priest. 

“Thank you, Abuelita!” Stan called, slipped one of the knuckle on his fingers. “See Ford? I’m a great role model.” He said, punching the Box Man in the face, again and again. “Always say please and thank you, kids.”  
“Don’t look at me, Great Uncle Ford! Ask Mabel, her boyfriend’s one of them!” Dipper shouted, as the pirate hooked his sword under Dipper’s leg and sent her brother sprawling to the ground. 

“No, he’s not!” Mabel shouted, firing her grappling hook into the face of the pirate. It went through him harmless as he turned himself hazy again. The pirate’s laughter hung on the air around him as he began to reform anew. Mabel smirked as she hit the retract button and let the gun slip trough her fingers, so that by the time the creature had reformed he was greeted by a hard smack to the nose that sent him reeling back in pain, a glowing green substance seeping through his fingers. Dipper laughed as he got to his feet, Grunkle Stan tossed him his spare brass knuckle and Dipper punched the creature in the gut. 

“And he’s not my boyfriend.” Mabel added, coming to stand beside Dipper over the stupefied pirate where he laid sprawled on the ground. Dipper rolled his eyes in exaggeration.  
“Sure.” Dipper said with a bored drawl and a sideways glance over at Mabel that said he knew better. “Great Uncle Ford,” Dipper said, running up to the man as he dislodged the harpoon from the wall and the no longer animated creature fell to the ground with a lifeless thump. “I think these are-”

“Yes, I was thinking the exact same thing. Which means we’ll need some electricity.”  
The pirate was beginning to get to his feet again, the Box Man remained unrelenting to an overzealous Grunkle Stan, things were still flying in the air, and the taxidermy creatures were getting up again. 

“Power box…” Stan said, twisting the Box Man into an arm trap but he nodded over to the metal box behind the countertop. Mabel followed her uncle’s gesture and practically vaulted over the table, threw open the box and looked over the tangled slew of cords, the wads of tap, chewing gum and wrappers and something that looked like a battery lapelled ‘Property of the Tent of Telepathy’ and looked to Ford. 

“What do I pull?” Mabel shouted to where Ford and Dipper were bent over the harpoon, Dipper placing tools into an opened six fingered palm without any direction, yet always seeming to come up with the right request every time for some reason.  
“Anything with a charge will do, dear.” 

Seemed simple enough Mabel thought, grabbing a couple cords attached to the Gleeful’s battery and with a pop, crackle and a tingly sensation up her arm yanked it from the wall and uncoiled its length to hand to Ford. He grabbed the wire, shoved it into the end of his modified harpoon, snapped the cover close, threw a switch that made the harpoon hum with bright blue energy that crackled up and down the metal head like lightening before plunging the harpoon in between the planks of wood. 

There was a humming note of energy that made Mabel’s teeth vibrate and her hair crackle, there was a flash of blue light and a gust of hot air. An eerie silence followed as the hollowing wind suddenly stopped, a moment before knick-knacks toppling to the ground with a plastic clatter. Bobble heads rolled, key chain clattered, pin-pong paddles, Stan’s most-distracting-object, Ford’s D&D&D dice pouch all topples to the ground with an unceremonious thunk. The man Grunkle Stan had been grappling with experienced a jolt that traveled up his spine and made his form crackle and quake like a member on a TV show whose signal has been momentarily interrupted by static. 

Stan dropped him with a growl of disgust and disappointment and they watched the limp man struggle with keeping his form intact, for his shape was blurry and tendrils of mist were seeping away from his form like bees evacuating a hive after having lost interest in its queen until there was next to nothing left of the man but a blurry blankety blob on the floor. The animal statues of horror toppled over lifelessly, misty haze leaking from behind their plastic eyes and rising in bending ribbons around their yellow teeth. 

For a moment there was nothing but the sound of ragged pants and stunned looks exchanged between the Pines.  
“From now on we’re sticking to Cornerella.” Mandy’s voice travelled from where Soos and Mandy were peering out from behind the Western swinging doors. Numbly Soos nodded. 

“Are…are you dudes OK?” He asked weakly, clearly not a clue as to what was going on but determined to be helpful regardless. He hadn’t had folk songs written about him for nothing.  
“Alright kids, we should probably move, before they retake their forms.” Ford said, his commanding voice ready to lead an army into battle. He even had one six-fingered hand fitted on one hip to solidity the illusion. 

“Wait, you mean that didn’t kill them?” Grunkle Stan demanded, dumbfounded but Ford only shook his head.  
“A powerful electric charge can temporally confuse the signal sent by their celestial essence, causing their projected image to scramble.”  
“English, please Ford!” Stan said wearily, Ford sighed.  
“It stunned them. Only ectoplasm can hurt them and sadly I’ve yet to consult the one family in this dimension that’s perfected ectoplasmic weaponry.” 

“English Ford!”  
“I don’t have anything that can stop them!” A stunned silence followed in which everyone stared at Ford with emotions ranging from heartbreak (mostly Dipper) to dismay (mostly Stan) to utter confession (mostly Soos).  
“But…” Dipper fumble, his eyes wide and pleading for his uncle to have an answer. “What about a silver mirror or…or holy water or an incantation or something…there’s got to be something.” Mabel’s heart broke at how lost Dipper sounded. Ford only shook his head. 

“These are class 6 or above, I’d estimate. Holy water and incantations won’t be enough to stop a whole horde of ghosts whose members rank no lower than six.”  
“But I stopped the lumberjack before, it was a level ten, I just figured out what he wanted and then…”  
“That was one Dipper, there are dozens of these!” Ford said with a shake of his head. “Even if we managed to stop one, even if we managed to stop ten, what about the others?” 

Dipper opened his mouth but no sound came out, his shoulders slumped as he stared at his hopeless idol. Mabel watched her brother nudge the edge of a lifeless squirrel-squirrel with one big toe, all he needed was rain and a puppy dog pout to make things complete. Mabel frowned, throwing an annoyed look to Ford from behind Dipper’s back, she shook her head and narrowed her eyes. She loved Ford dearly (the man had stories from dimensions where rainbows could be sampled out of the air, for crying out loud!) but she wished, oh wished that Ford could remember how much Dipper idolized him. 

Coming from Ford, an insult was a stab wound, the smallest amount of praise was a blessing from the gods themselves, to call something hopeless was to set it in stone. Mabel often struggled with a twinge of jealousy towards Ford, that he could hold such sway over her brother’s life while she could only live to make him laugh from time to time. It annoyed her especially in moments like this, when Ford was wrong. 

Turning on her heels, she stormed to the back of the merchandise shelves and was pleased to find her little prisoner still writhing in its temporary cage and she grinned at her own cleverness. Cats weren’t exactly her favourite animal (that would be Waddles, dolphins and hot blond bow-slinging elves) but she had spent enough times cat sitting for Lazy Susan to know their greatest weakness: sweaters. 

The King of the Cats was struggling to worm its body through the arm sleeve of bright red woolen sweater with a giraffe shooting lazars out of its eyes (its long neck made it the perfect for the deadly superpower). It was quite a lucky thing that Mabel Sweaters were currently selling quite well in this chilly summer. 

The large hole for her waist she had knotted using the string of a Mystery Shack paddleball, leaving the only means of escape to be the neck hole (which he might have gotten out through with a bit of struggling, though it was way more amusing to Mabel that he hadn’t tried this way) or the arm sleeves, which were far too small. He had almost made it though; the frilly cuffs bonneted his head, though his ears were still stuck inside, stretching his eyes up cosmetically. 

She laughed as she picked up the wriggling, worming bundle and hauled it back to the bickering Pines men and one stuttering Rimirez.  
“I’m just saying, punching is always the answer.” Stan seemed to be repeating.  
“And I’m just saying,” Ford said, clearly annoyed. “That we can’t Stanley. They’re not…really here. They’re projections created by their essence, they can consciously manage their physical density, unless you sneak up on them, you’ll be punching smoke.”  
“This one feels real enough.” Mabel said, laying the King on the counter where he continued to struggle. 

“What’s that?” Dipper asked,  
“The King of the Cats.” Mabel replied, a little self satisfied at knowing something Dipper did not. “He was with the…um…ghosts? Are we going with ghosts? Or what did you say Ford? Celestial…essence?”  
Ford blinked, astounded and opened mouthed at the writhing cat on the counter, looking at Mabel with that dazed look he and Dipper sometimes shared, where they thoughts seemed preoccupied by the contents of another world.  
“What? Oh…I suppose ghosts would be simpler.” 

“Right, ok. I think he’s one of them but I’m not sure. I mean he did possess a stuffed animal earlier and he did that misty thing.”  
“Wait, if he can go through stuff like those other green dudes, why doesn’t he just go through your sweater?” Soos asked, peering over Grunkle Stan’s shoulder. 

The group froze, the cat on the counter went rigid for a solid thirty seconds, its wide red eyes going even wider, bulging from its skull, reeling from its own stupidity as its gaze flickered from Mabel to Ford as the old man wrenched his harpoon with a splintering crack from the floorboards and held it mere millimeters from the cat’s blood red eye. 

Grunkle Ford flicked a switch and the bright blue energy crackled around the harpoon’s wicked point.  
“Because he knows what’s good for him.” Her Grunkle growled, his voice low and threatening. In the light of the blue electricity the cat’s slanted pupils shrank until they were nothing but black paper cuts. Then the cat did the worse thing of all: it smiled. 

Suddenly, Mabel was struck with the realization why nature had decreed dogs were allowed to grin and cats were forever damned to look off putting except in cartoons. It was freaking disturbing. A predatorily sharp-toothed grin that stretched his lips beyond their usual limits. Then it got worse, because the creature spoke. 

“Clearly not, else I wouldn’t have bothered coming here at all.” The cat said, laughter dripping off of his voice, a smug little purr tasting the edges of his words, his voice sleek and soothing like his inky fur.  
“That….unusual.” Grunkle Stan said, his eyes widening but his face seemed determined to remain neutral. Dipper’s face seemed to have no such plans as he openly gaped at the creature.  
“It talked.” Dipper gasped. The cat chuckled. 

“Smart lad, isn’t he? I bet he gets his brains from you.” He said, narrowing his eyes slightly as it eyed Ford like her Great Uncle was a tasty mouse. The pleasing smile never wavered from its lips.  
“What were you and your ghostly companions looking for? What it is you want?” Ford demanded, venom and force rising in his words, he placed one knuckled hand on the counter, threateningly close to the animal’s neck. 

The King of the Cats’ eyes followed Ford’s hand onto the table, then slide slowly back up to meet his gaze, he otherwise seemed unmoved.  
“Want?” The creature asked, bemused. “What we want and what we are looking for are two very different things. But perhaps when you and the rest of your family join us, you’ll better understand. And by the looks of it that will be very soon, indeed.” 

The slits of his eyes slide off her uncle and down to the floor. Mabel followed his gaze, the tendrils of hazy smoke, once disorganized and aimless, were circling back to their host, filing themselves around a bright ball of light, turning more humanoid by the minute. Freshly formed fingers twitched, shoulders rolled, floating red eyes gazed at their group in hatred. 

Grunkle Stan cursed in a colourful language he’d reestablished into dialect after she and her brother had fully hit puberty. Soos screamed and grabbed Mandy, Ford shouted “Out! Out! Everyone Out!”, bullying and herding their lot in their bare feet out through the door, Grunkle Stan wrestling passed his brother in order to sling a wide eyed Abuelita onto one shoulder. Mabel snapped her head back over towards the King of the Cats to glare at him with all her might. He chuckled softly under his breath. Dipper grabbed Mabel’s hand hauled her towards the door. She let herself be tugged along but kept her eyes on the cat. 

He phased his tail through her sweater first in order to wave it at her in farewell before the rest of him slipped through the sweater and he vanished into a hazy mist. Then Stan slammed the door shut and Mandy slapped the ‘gone fishing, be back in 15 minutes’ sign on the screen door. They were leaping the porch steps and fleeing through the woods. Pine trees all around her then, soft pine needles under her feet, their acidic scent pinched her nose and the frost creeped under her fingernails. 

Up above an owl screeched and the snapping tent flag from Circus Gothica were black against the full moon. Her brother’s hand held her so tightly she feared her fingers might break as the pair of them ran with all their might. She doubted they’d be back in 15 minutes.


	4. Confrontations

The night was all stillness under the hazy light of the moon. Crickets chirped and night things howled somewhere in the distance, pine trees whispered as they brushed against one another, their dark silhouette’s rocking back and forth in the breeze like ships tossed against a cloudy sea. Dipper’s butt was freezing and numb where it was firmly planted on his rock, staring with his head in his hands down at the handful of twinkling streetlamps of Gravity Falls’ Main Street. In between the dark greenery it looked like a cluster of fallen stars. 

Even though the darkness was unyielding, he could still pick out the vague outlined shapes he had come to know and love so well. The swimming pool where Mermando had lived, the site of the alien crash him and Ford had explored, the glowing fountain on the front lawn of McGucket Manor, the distant totem pole marking the Mystery Shack. His beloved home, and in the center of all these loving memories, those fluttering tent flags like a cancerous wound, like a parasite waving at him in mockery was the tents of Circus Gothica. 

He narrowed his gaze and got to his feet, looked over his shoulder at Auntie Witch’s cave where their sorry band was temporarily camped out while Ford made some calls and reevaluated their situation and thought out possible plans, which was at the moment to run and hide and prey they weren’t found. 

Auntie Witch’s cave had been significantly remodeled since Dipper was younger, it wasn’t a cave that was dripping and damp and filled with sort of nasty squishy wet things. Unless you counted the severed human hands, those had stayed but the rest of the cave had been rededicated to a warm hearth, soft rugs and comfy flower print chairs, even now the scent of baking biscuits mixed with formaldehyde (a permeating scent that Auntie Witch couldn’t manage to get rid of) wafted from the open wooden door. It beckoned with all the comforts of home. 

Dipper sighed, Mabel was braiding Auntie Witch’s silvery white hair and was in the middle of probably telling one of her best stories because the little hunched over woman was laughing so hard tears were leaking out of her crossed, blind eyes. Ford and Stan were sitting at the kitchen table, mindlessly eating scones handed off to them by Marcus, Auntie Witch’s current boyfriend (gag!) and looking worried. Soos and Mandy sat by the fire, thawing out their frozen feet while Abuelita cleaned with a tense, quick jerks of her broom as she swept the severed hands into the corner, not to be discouraged that they constantly got up, shook themselves off and danced away again. A scuttle of rocks and the tug of a pair of fingers at his ankle and he looked down to see Clive, one of Auntie Witch’s severed hands. 

Like the other hands that scurried around Auntie’s Witch’s cave like spiders, he was green and slightly moldering. On his ring finger he wore a silver ring so Dipper could always tell him apart and his fingernails chipped sparkly blue nail polish from when Mabel was last over to visit. Dipper sighed and sat down again. 

“I’m telling you Clive,” Dipper grumbled, letting the hand inch itself up his leg to sit patiently on his knee. “It’s like Ford and everyone else is forgetting that I’ve faced stuff like this before. I’ve faced the lumberjack and well…I mean, I got turned to wood momentarily but Pacifica and I came out on top in the end. I also faced off with the store ghosts and…I mean, I’ve faced Bill, for crying out loud.”

As he said the Beast’s name, the wind picked up and leaves scuttled past him to be carried away by the wind. He shuddered. “I don’t know why Ford is so afraid. And why we retreated here, of all places. We should have gone to McGucket Manor, like I suggested…though I guess that place is already pretty susceptible to ghosts…or we should have gone to Ford’s bunker or his lab or something.” 

He sighed, “No one listens to me. I told Mabel I didn’t have a good feeling about the Circus, made it clear to everyone I didn’t like that kid. He’s just like every other guy Mabel has had a crush on. They smile and think they’re job is done, you know? But did anyone listen to me, then? Nope. And now our house is overrun with ghosts and I’m in pajamas up a mountainside, talking to a hand….no offense, Clive.” He added quickly, and Clive patted his knee with understanding and affection. 

Dipper smiled and gently patted the top of the hand before continuing. “If we just had some weapons of our own. I say we stalk up on silver mirrors, holy water, salt, garlic, the works and just go in there, Taser guns blazing. Then I can show that stupid punk what happens when you mess with my sister.” He smiled at the thought of making that ghost boy remember how lucky he had been when Mabel had liked him.

But quickly cringed when he thought of the ice that had snuck into his joint, the fear he had felt when he had heard the ghosts in the gift shop, saw the boy with the white hair step through the Western doors. Why had he been so afraid? Why had Mabel rushed forward while he had been petrified to breath let alone move? If he had hesitated for but a moment too long, what would have become of Mabel? It irritated him to no end, how afraid he had grown over the years. When he cowered at shadows and hunted ghosts of the past while Mabel blazed ahead and were willing to protect a boy who had betrayed her. Why couldn’t he be more like his sister? A little more brave, a little more reckless? 

He threw a glance over at the cave, from whence warm golden light poured, beckoning him to its warmth and its company, where his family waited. He sighed and was about to stand when Clive balanced himself onto his stump and opened his palm, waving back and forth frantically.   
“What is it, Clive?” Dipper asked, in answer Clive began signing things in frantic motions so that his nail polish winked in the light from the cave. 

Dipper scrunched up his face, trying to remember the few lessons in sign language Auntie Witch had sat them through during their Sunday tea visits. He caught something along the lines of ghost…tool…got from…world….tool…tool…tool…ghost…tool  
“Tool?” Dipper asked, confused. Clive’s frantic movements froze in the air for a moment, before all his erect fingers dipped like a limp plant and he slowly shook his fingers. Like a startled spider, Clive scurried down Dipper’s leg and at his finger began tracing lines in the dirt. 

Dipper leaned forward, watching Clive balance himself with difficult on his three remaining fingers and thumb as he dragged his index finger through the dirt behind him like a tail. As slowly, so slowly the word began to materialize, Dipper’s smile grew along with it. He’d gotten the sign wrong. It wasn’t tool.   
“Weapon.” He read, he was grinning now, a wicked smile that spread from ear to ear. He crouched next to Clive in the dirt. 

“Clive, are you saying that Auntie Witch has a weapon that can be used on ghosts?” Clive balled his fingers into a fist and dipped them forward in a nod. Dipper almost wanted to laugh at the fresh throb of excitement that course through him.   
“Can you…can you show me where she has it?”   
Clive hesitated, clearly thinking, he unfolded his fingers and tilted them towards where Auntie Witch was currently rummaging through her bookshelves, pulling romantic novels off the shelf for Mabel to borrow.

Mabel grinned and nodded eagerly, holding up a copy of what looked like the twenty-eight book in that junky teen wolf romance series.  
“Clive, Clive.” Dipper insisted, pulling the hand’s attention away from his mistress. “Listen, I’ll be back before the night’s over, no one will even notice I’m gone, Auntie Witch won’t notice that this…weapon of hers is even missing. Just in and out, really quickly while I take care of this ghost problem for my family. Please?”   
The hand continued to hesitate. 

“Come on, Clive. I’ll give you Mabel’s stash of glittery hand lotion.” Dipper said and Clive’s finger’s perched up with interest. Dipper waited on the edge of his seat as Clive debated, looking from Dipper, to the cave, to Dipper again. Finally Clive nodded and Dipper tried not to whoop with delight. Clive balanced on the stub of his wrist and gestured with a curled index finger for Dipper to follow him, then he scurried across the lighted surface of the cave entrance and Dipper with one quick look over his Grunkles, Mabel, Soos, Mandy and Abuelita, followed after Clive. 

‘Don’t worry guys,’ He thought, ‘I won’t be gone for long…just long enough to take care of our little problem. Then you’ll see, you’ll see just how much you should have listened to me’. So he followed Clive around the side of the mountain to what looked to be Auntie Witch’s backdoor. It had one Stan’s ‘buzz off’ welcome mats and a lock on the door. Clive tipped over a nearby rock for the key and after a fumbling moment led Dipper into a dark room heaped with piled junk that teetered amongst the dripping teeth of the cave. 

After a few bumbling, toe-stubbing moments Clive guided him over to a box with the lid tightly clamped shut using dozens of severed fingers embedded in the wood like horrendous stitch work. Clive scurried onto the top of the lid, pause for a moment as if to catch his breath and tapped his index finger with echoing thud…thud…thud-thud. All the fingers peeled themselves away from the wood, wrenching their fingernails from the surface with pop and splintering sounds as they unfolded like flowers. Dipper opened the lid and grinned as green luminescent light poured over his face. This looked to him like a plan. 

Soon, he was walking through the woods, the chilled pine needles forging a soft and silent carpet for his bare feet, his new weapon on his hip, wrapped in an old tarp he’d found in his Auntie Witch’s junk heap, Clive perched on his shoulder, occasionally giving him a light squeeze of affection and reassurance. For the first time in what felt like years, he wasn’t afraid of the dark. There was a spring to his step as he walked, a feeling of assurance that by the time morning arrived, everything would be alright again, everything would be normal and to boot, Dipper might finally have some answers.

He was nervous of course, but it was a nerve he was use to, a nerve that felt like he was slipping back into an old role, a performance he knew well. No longer was he chasing shadows, no longer was he listening to the whisper weird of Gravity Falls kiss his eyelashes in his sleep. Now he knew where the nightmares lurked and he was finally, finally going to meet them. 

But morning was taking an awful long time to come, he noted. He peered up at the darkened sky, where the stars were still as bright as any sea of glittering diamonds, as the moon glowed like a silver coin hanging in the sky. He tried to recall the nights he and Wendy had spent sprawled on the grass in the meadow to watch the meteor showers and Wendy had begun listing off the different names and constellations of the stars and their navigational purposes. 

‘My dad would take me to sit on the front porch before I went to bed’ Wendy had said, the scent of dewy grass had been all around them, the fireflies had been out and the crickets had sang like they were doing tonight. ‘As a bedtime story he would tell me about the stars. About how the Dragon right there got tossed into the sky for not guarding an apple tree, how Perseus and Heracles got stuck up there too, the dorks. That one was always my favourite though, Orion. Gay BFF of the Artemis until he got axed off.’

‘The best mortal hunter there ever was. You can see him right there with his hound Sirius. And every night, Orion rising up from the east on his back, stands up in the south in the dead of night and falls forward on his face in the west by dawn. That’s a good way of telling where you are and what time of night it is, a little trick for you, free of charge.’   
Dipper smiled at the memory and after a quick scanning of the sky found the famed hunter…standing erect in what he assumed must be the south. 

He frowned, thinking how weird that was, as he walked (and he walked for a long time yet) he continued to look over his shoulder to check that Orion was still there, still standing, still looking down on him with far too much authority for a man who fell on his face every morning. And who apparently, was very, very late to the task. He shook himself free of the thought and Clive squeezed his shoulder again. Perhaps he had just misread the stars, he wasn’t Wendy after all, maybe that constellation wasn’t Orion, maybe it was his look-alike twin sister, who sometimes tied her hair up and tucked it under Orion’s hat and went into the sky and pretended to be him. Mabel did that a lot at their high school. 

He felt his gut turn over inside him as he thought of Mabel, he probably should have brought her along, probably should have told her what he was up to. As much as he liked Clive (as much as one could like a severed hand) he missed his Mystery Twin and as he neared the snapping tent flags, and the wrought iron fence that enclosed the whole pavilion, Dipper was less and less certain of his brilliant plan and the bravery that was required in order to do it. Behind the cover of the trees, just beside the fence he paused, trying hard not to breathe as he listened.

His hand gripped his newly attained…‘gift’ from his aunt in one sweat slicked fist and it suddenly occurred to Dipper that he wasn’t entirely sure how to use it. He probably should have tested it first or gave it to Ford or just-   
The wind whistled through the treetops, laughter whispering in between the pine needles, a shiver ran down Dipper’s spine as leaves fluttered about him, tangled in the breeze. He took a step back and turned, looking over his shoulder and looking over his shoulder until he threatened to turn himself in circles looking for an enemy he knew was there but couldn’t see. 

“Don’t worry Clive.” He whispered, the hand on his shoulder was clinging to his t-shirt and trembling. Maybe he was trying to tell himself that too. He wasn’t afraid, not at the shack, not in the woods, not in the dark, not anymore.   
The laughter became a tangible thing, less echoed and more life like as the leaves, black and withered as though they’d been through a fire gathered together to melt into a black three piece suit, a billowing coat and a pale, grinning face with hungry red eyes. Dipper took an instinctive step away from the boy, trying to recall the helpless look Mabel’s little crush had had while on his knees back in the Mystery Shack. 

The only remnant of the event on the boy’s wicked face was a smear of green glowing goo that leaked from somewhere in the boy’s snowy hair and dripped unattended down his temple and off his chin. Never had the boy looked so unearthly…and not just because he was hovering a good few feet above the ground. There was something in his angled, pointed face, something that looked demonic and hungry. The boy tilted his head to the side to study Dipper, similar to what he had done in the shack, only this time his expression was a manic grin that glinted with wicked delight, like the boy was famished and inspecting his meal. 

Dipper steeled his nerves and forced his back to straighten, forced his hands to stop shaking as he glared at the creature.   
“Get your goons out of my house.” He commanded, his hand resting on his weapon. “And all of you freaks get out of my town.”   
The boy’s face was like that of a forgotten doll’s, his head tilted to the side, a plastic smile painted on his face as green dripped and dropped its way from his temple, falling like a tear to splatter on the ground where it pools like spilled florescent mouthwash. 

His feet dangled uselessly under him like a hanged man’s and Dipper recoiled from the horrendous imagery.   
“Well?” Dipper demanded, waiting for something to happen, anything really, the suspense was killing him. His muscles felt like they would pull themselves off his bones, they were so taunt and tense.   
“Freaks?” The boy said at last, his voice sounded cracked, strained and desperate. Laughter was in his voice while tears leaked from the corners of his eyes to slide down his cheeks. “Yes…that’s right.” 

His head snapped up again, and he lunged forward, red eyes glinting. He moved faster than thought, one moment still and the next he was nearly upon Dipper. Dipper gasped and missed the boy’s green flaming palm by a hair’s breath, he spun out of the way as he drew his weapon and it sang through the air with a clean silver note. As the boy spun around in midair, Dipper watched with satisfaction as the boy’s red eyes grew wide in surprise, crackling with something like recognition. 

It might have been a sword but it was like nothing that Dipper had every seen. Its naked metal was a deep shade of dark, royal purple and its hilt was twisted into a vine pattern that curled and coiled around a skull pommel with ruby studded in its eye sockets. It was pretty damn cool and that didn’t even include the green fire that licked around the metal and blazed like beacon, giving everything around them horrible shadowed edges and staining it a greenish glow. The ghost boy blinked, taken aback and Dipper couldn’t help but be pleased. 

“Yeah, that’s right. It’s a flaming sword. I’m aware how cool this makes me look.” Dipper said with a grin. There was no heat that the flames emitted, nor had it seemed bothered by the canvas Dipper had thrown over it to shade its light when he’d been walking here. It seemed interested in the ghost boy though, Dipper could practically feel the metal leaning towards the boy’s hovering form, like it wanted nothing more that to slice him in half. 

After a moment’s pause, the boy face, shadowed in the greenish light so that his eyes looked like sunken pits and his cheeks seemed hollowed out like a skull, scrunched itself up with hatred and determination. He held his arm behind his head like he was planning on throwing something and a ball of crackling fiery lightening grew like a snowball when you roll it down the hill. Dipper’s eyes widened a fraction as the boy hurled the ball directly at Dipper where it whizzed towards him like a comet, fiery tail trailing behind it. 

The sword jerked his hand around so that the flat of the purple blade reflected his own worried eyes before there was an explosion of fiery light as the ball struck the blade, then a pause as the tongues of fire seemed to hang in the air, frozen and lifeless as they coiled around him, reflecting in the sword’s metal, lighting up the world with bright hues of green before retracting into the sword, being suck in with a whoosh of air, leaving the flames of his sword glowing bright and licking higher than they had before. Dipper lowered the sword as the two boys stared at it in amazement.   
“Wow…what else do you do?” Dipper asked out loud. The ghost boy gritted his teeth with irritation and Dipper laughed with giddy delight. 

“What’s the matter? A little frustrated the field’s a little more level now?”   
“Level?” The boy asked with a smirk, and he flew towards Dipper with refreshed zeal, Dipper dodged and the sword nearly jerked his arm clean from its socket as it turned its blade towards the boy’s form with a hungry zeal. Dipper could feel its hilt tremble against his skin with eager anticipation. The ghost boy raised his arm and glowing disk of green; a crystalized shield like green bottle glass grew while with his other hand another orb of fire was blooming. 

The sword collided with the boy’s shield and there was a sound like shattering glass as the sword went clean through it. The ghost boy’s eyes widened, the fire forgotten and faded from his free hand as he was forced to spin uncomfortably in the air to avoid be cleaved in half. The boy let out a gasp of pain and as he tumbled through the air he clutched at his side, green staining his pretty white gloves. Dipper looked down at his sword and watched with a mixture of horror and fascination as the green blood-like substance lingered on the blade for a moment before the blood lost its glow, its hue and faded into a black stain on the metal until it was nothing at all. 

The blade’s flames grew brighter, as though asking for more. Dipper struggled against an overwhelming sense of disgust.   
“What is this thing?” He asked Clive, Clive only trembled, gripping Dipper’s t-shirt with white knuckles and refused to give any better answer. Dipper raised his eyes back to where the boy was hovering in the air, watching him. Slowly his hands pulled away from the wound on his side, green blood sliding from the wound freely but the boy no longer seemed to care. 

He lowered himself to the ground, his toes just lightly touching the earth as though afraid of it. The boy paused for a moment, Dipper could see the quick calculations clicking and whirling behind the boy’s red glinting eyes.   
“I wonder…” The boy said slowly, carefully, his pale pink lips touched with the hints of a smile. “How are you planning on getting to the Ghost Zone without a ghost?”   
Dipper paused, caught off guard as he blinked at the boy.   
“How did you-?”

The boy scoffed, his red eyes dancing. “A certain cat told me you’re eagerly seeking a way to the land of the dead. You’ll never get there without dying yourself.” The boy said with a laugh, “Or unless you had a little ghost with a candle of his own to guide your way.”   
A tiny little green flame licked in between the boy’s twirling fingers to prove his point. Dipper hesitated, the sword humming in his hand, goading him onward and yet he failed to move, he was watching the flame in the ghost boy’s hand, mesmerized. 

“And?” Dipper finally asked, trying not to let his voice sound too eager, too desperate, a flickering of emotion that crinkled the bridge of the boy’s nose, a flutter of anger and annoyance that darted across his face like the shadows emitted by his flame and then it was gone again, easily forgotten like a dream.   
“Perhaps we could be of assistance to each other. You need only give my master what he seeks and he and I and all our cohorts will go home to our ghostly realm…we’ll take you with us if you’d like.” 

Dipper gulped, looking the boy up and down, trying to detect the lie in the boy’s eyes but he could find none.   
“What…what are you looking for exactly?”   
The boy’s eyes flashed, he took a step closer. Dipper’s sword was practically inching its way out of his hand. Dipper took a step back.   
“Something that was inside your uncle’s portal. Something he kept when he dismantled it.” 

The Inter-dimensional Rift was first to Dipper’s mind before he was forced to remember the Rift had been lost, so it couldn’t be they were looking for that. He thought of the all the nuts, screws and bolts, the alien adhesive, the strips of metal, nothing struck him as important or worth having until he remembered a tiny little orb in Ford’s dice baggy for D&D&D. He had only seen it a handful of times in the past two summers, and only in momentary glances when Ford had to dig through the bag when the family was playing a board game or when Dipper came up with a new dungeon to play. 

It wasn’t the Infinite Die, there was a special case for that, it was something smaller, more like a marble, pale and insignificant. The only reason Dipper remembered it at all was the fact that it had a black sliver down the center of the die like an eye. When he had asked his Uncle about it last year when the bag had tumbled open during one rowdy game of snakes and ladders, Ford had merely snatched the marble out of his hand, tucked it back into the bag and mumbled something about it being a piece of his portal, a piece he preferred to keep close. Surly that wasn’t what the ghost boy meant and he crooked his eyebrow in curiosity at the boy. 

“You can’t think of anything?” The boy pressed on, he took a step closer.   
Slowly, with what he hoped was real sincerity, Dipper shook his head.   
“Perhaps you’d like some assistance.” The ghost boy purred and he faded, just like that, like a cloud of smoke stirred up by the wind; his form dispersed and was gone. Dipper froze; he could hear the boy’s laughter drifting through the air, in between the branches, stirring up the brown and withered pine needles on the forest floor. He turned this way and that way, he felt a breath on his cheek and the blade jerked around to his side but he touched only air. 

He could feel hands pressed against his back, pushing into his back, through him, inside him and he writhed in a panic. The sword dropped from his hand, forgotten as he reached over his back in an attempt to get at the thing trying to crawl inside him.   
“Get out! Get out!” He screamed, it kept pushing, kept wriggling, like a worm eating its way into his flesh. He could feel it inside him, filling up his body, not enough room for the two of them, pushing and prying its way inside. He dropped to his knees, sheer terror filling him as his thoughts were crowded and clouded over in a dreamy haze. 

‘Sleep,’ the haze said, ‘sleep and let me in.’  
‘No!’ Was Dipper only thought as he pushed back, demanding a place for himself in his own head. He would not become a puppet again, one demon had already lived inside him and abused him while he had been helpless to do anything but watch, he would not be so easily won over again, not so easily fooled. He dug into the haze that surrounded him, shoving and resisting until with a jolt he saw a train track and he on a rumbling train looking out over the rails as they ran away from him, watched for the sheer second they were in view a boy and a girl, lying sprawled and motionless over the rails, their bodies broken, limps twisted and tangled lying in ruby puddles of their own blood. They had glassy eyes that stared at him imploringly, eyes that screamed of betrayal and then they were gone, the train pulled away, their crumpled forms faded into the night, the wind was around him and the train’s whistle screamed. 

But it wasn’t the train whistle, it was a voice, his voice, screaming and ripping his throat raw with words that were not his own.   
“NO! NO! I DIDN’T MEAN TO, I DIDN’T WANT TO DO IT, HE MADE ME! HE MADE ME, SAM! TUCKER! YOU KNOW I WOULD NEVER DO ANYTHING TO HURT YOU!” His hands were clawing at his hair, ripping and shaking it in a distraught manner he could relate but the action was not his command. He reached for the use of his limbs and found them nowhere. He commanded his limbs to move and nothing happened, he shoulders shook with sobs that racked his spine but he didn’t will it. Terror gripped him, he screamed but his scream didn’t make it to his lips. 

“I’m sorry,” The words came from his lips instead. “I’m sorry…I’m sorry, please forgive me…Sam and Tucker…Sam and Tucker forgive me….”   
In fury and frustration, he dove deeper into the haze, pressing in on it, digging away at it tooth and nail. Did this ghost boy think he so easily owned? That he wouldn’t fight? Didn’t the boy know he was nothing compared to Bill Cipher?   
As he clawed he was met with emotions of surprise and confusion, as if the boy wasn’t used to being resisted. 

“Get…out…of…me…” The words wrenched themselves from his lips, he pushed deeper until he saw a smiling red haired woman with bright, intelligent violet eyes looking at him with worry, reaching out to touch his shoulder but he jerked back.   
“STOP!” The words rattled off his lips, and suddenly the haze was around him, enclosing him, suffocating him, like a wave that washed over him it was impossible to resist.   
‘Let me in,’ the haze commanded and Dipper could feel the links of his chains settling around him, ensnaring him. It was not a question; there wasn’t an answer Dipper could give. The haze was already in, already inside him but Dipper refused to sleep. 

‘Some memories just too painful for you?’ Dipper mentally pushed the thought into the haze, unsure of what response he would get.   
He watched as his body got to its feet and with a sharp flick of his own wrist, Dipper watched as his body slapped itself in the face and felt a sharp jolt as a thousand needles pricked his cheek.   
“Shut up.” The words came from his mouth as his feet began to move, his hand bent to picked up his aunt’s sword, his arms held it aloft. “My master shall be pleased.” 

‘You shut up!’ Dipper mentally snarled, ‘You’re the one who killed Tucker and Sam, right?’ in response he felt his own face twitch in a smile and was forced to watch was his hand slide down the edge of the blade, watch it slowly slice open his fingertips and watched the blade greedily lap up his own blood. He resisted the urge to be taken up by the pain, to be subdued and satisfied just after a little cut. He saw a flicking movement out of the corner of his eye. His gaze was turned and he caught a glimpse of Clive. 

‘Clive!’ Dipper shouted excited, and when his lips didn’t respond, he pushed harder. ‘Clive, CLIVE, GET MABEL, GET HELP!’   
“Clive.” His lips repeated coolly, a smirk dressed his lips. “Go fetch my sister, will you? Tell her I’ll see her at the show tonight.”   
The poor little hand stood frozen for a moment as Dipper’s lips smiled to his little friend. Then his steps turned away and carried him into the circus.


	5. Spying

Mabel had watched Dipper leave, she had watched him let Clive lead him to the back door of the cave and come out again with a wrapped bundle that Dipper seemed immensely pleased about and that had Mabel deeply concerned. So she calmly went back inside the warm glow of the caves, and sat down with her back leaned up against her Auntie Witch’s legs, watching her uncles talk in worried voices and calmly started packing up the things she thought she might need.

Marcus had tons of hiking gear, and Auntie Witch had a surprisingly vast collection of odd assortments, charms made out of pebbles and driftwood, feathers and bones, shoot smeared runes caking bowls and knives, little stones with holes worn all the way through them. She picked and chose her way into having a healthy bundle of well-preparedness bunched up at her feet. She didn’t mind taking her time, she knew where Dipper was heading and as much as she loved her brother, she was vastly aware of how well she could outpace him. 

Besides, for some reason (as much as it stung her) Dipper wanted to do this alone. So she would let him do it alone…until he needed someone to break his fall.   
“Going somewhere?” A familiar voice asked curiously, she looked up into the dead crossed eyes of her aunt and smiled.   
“Off to save my brother, Auntie. You won’t tell the boys, will you? Dipper would hate me for life if I squealed on his plans.” 

The old woman winked a pale, lifeless eye at her and smirked a gummy smirk.   
“I’m a cave witch, dearie. It’s not like I have an hyperactive social life to begin with.” She drummed her long yellow fingernails on her flower printed armchair in thought. “It’s a ghost you’re squaring off against, yes?”   
Mabel nodded.   
“And you like him?” 

Mabel opened her mouth but closed it quickly. Did she still like him? She had plenty of reasons not to, and yet…he had tried to save her and Dipper. He had held her as they flew through the air, there was the crackle in his eyes at strange moments that could transform his face, that made him seem like a completely different person. How could she properly describe that? And then there was the weird dream…  
“Not really.” She decided. “He’s a bad guy, after all.” 

“Is he now?” Auntie Witch said with a knowing crinkle in the crow’s feet around her eyes.   
“Isn’t he?” Mabel asked, tilting her head ponderously to the side.   
“Child, knowing who your enemies are and aren’t is half the battle won.” Auntie Witch replied with that sage tone in her voice that made Mabel purse her lips with annoyance to the side of her face.   
“Is there something you’re not telling me, Auntie?”   
“What makes you say that?” 

“Well because you’re probably the one who knows the most about ghosts here.”   
The witch leaned back in her chair until the leg rest rose and she sighed with satisfaction now that her hair feet with long yellow toenails were properly elevated.   
“I know a lot about a lot of things. It’s mostly to do with hands though. But I know a few things about ghosts too, having been one myself a couple of times.” 

The news startled Mabel, not over the fact that her aunt had died, she knew a rotting corpse when she smelled one but the fact that she would be so placid about it, like how one might remember a jolly holiday to the beach.  
“Oh…” She said, sitting very straight and still from her spot on the ground, her face now level with the woman’s terribly ripe feet, wondering how one continues on in conversation from a point like that. “What…what was it like?” 

“Dying?” The Witch asked with a raised eyebrow, she paused and then with a shrug of her shoulders and a shake of her hand like she was swatting away flies, let the thought slip away. “Anti-climatic, to be terribly honest. It was a cold winter’s day and I was walking home from church. I slip on a patch of ice and hit my head, fell into a dazed stupor and I must have remained unconscious until I froze to death.” 

Mabel gaped at the woman and without acknowledging Mabel’s obvious horror, the woman went on, “Now the stuff after you’re dead, that’s much more interesting to talk about. You float for a bit, this way and that way, like you’re a leaf on the wind, nothing grounds you, nothing physical, it’s just your thoughts, your feelings that remain. Who you are and what made you special is what keeps your energy, your essence, your soul from dispersing and slipping into other things. Like dandelions and daydreams and newborn babies, things like that. 

What kept me around was…well, my love of hands. I was always obsessed with them when I was alive. I loved looking at them, drawing them, painting them. Holding my husband’s hands, kissing a baby’s little rosy fingernails. My mother had been quite the posh lady; she loved to have things cleaned. My hair had to be combed a hundred times a day-that’s probably why there’s so little of it now, ha- and my hands, I had to always, always keep washing them. Perhaps I had other interests, other loves that I held dear, but that’s what stayed, because for some reason those are the memories I clung to. 

The feel of my father’s hand in mine, the sting of my aunt’s rings when they scraped my cheek. That’s what I clung to and thought about until I decided to…come back home to my body. A lot of ghosts don’t think they can, but my aunt showed me a way to do it, so I did and now here I am. Twice dead and twice returned, though a little worse for wear perhaps and a little….less than what I was. But that’s the thing you see, I had no firm grip on who I was. I had no better identity than a little hand fetish, so that’s the thing that stayed. I don’t remember the face of my husband or if the baby whose hands I kissed was mine or a relative’s or a neighbor’s. 

You loose the bits of yourself that you don’t hold onto with tooth and nail and grit. Not to say of course…if one was lucky enough to have someone around to help them remember…” The woman trailed off, rolling her dead eyes to look directly at Mabel, directly through Mabel until she felt like a frog being gutted on a corkboard by those eyes.   
“I…I don’t really understand you, auntie.” Mabel said shyly, wishing that the old woman would explain but at the same time acutely aware that the distance between herself and her brother was widening by the minute. She might have to jog to catch up with him. 

The old woman looked down at her and one of her severed hands picked up one of Marco’s tea biscuits sprinkled with spider legs and passed it to the witch, who popped it in her mouth and gave it a thoughtful crunch.   
“That’s the thing about being twice dead, I suppose. Every time you come back, people understand you less and less.” She grabbed another biscuit and picked off the spider legs before handing it off to Mabel. “There you go sweetie.” She said, one of the severed hands patted her fondly on the cheek. 

“If you’re going to take any token of protection against ghosts, I’d recommend this one.” She said, and one of the hands scurried forward to offer up a pinkie on which a fat black jewel embedded in a silver ring loosely hung. Mabel took the jewel and slide it onto her ring finger where it remained like it was made for her hand. She gave the woman a large smile but Auntie Witch seemed more bent on picking the spider legs from in between her teeth. “That’ll keep any wandering souls away. Now have fun saving your brother.” 

Mabel nodded, got to her feet and headed out the door. Never had the shadows seemed so alive to Mabel, never had they seemed to leer at her with sharp glinting teeth and wicked feral eyes. Every rustle of the leaves made her think that ghosts were nearby, every crunch of a twig sent her heart a flutter. She longed for her brother and hurried down the way she hoped he had gone. She could detect no trace of him, could hear nothing for his footsteps or voice and worried that she had somehow miscalculated in where her twin might have gone. Maybe he had gone to the Corduroy’s cabin to get Wendy, maybe he had gone to McGucket Manor to stock up on hillbilly weaponry. 

Hell, maybe he had gone to Pacifica’s to kiss her goodbye. But those thoughts were nothing but buzzing flies to bother her mind, in her heart of hearts she knew where Dipper was and in Marco’s clunky hiking boots she picked up the pace, her long strides carrying her down the mountainside. As she walked, she became aware of a sleek ebony body slinking out of the shadows to stroll silently beside her.   
“You know he’s probably waiting for you.” His voice was soft, purring and sent a chill down Mabel’s spine. 

“Oh, so now you’re helping me?” Mabel snapped, throwing a fowl glance down at the cat. His fur was like an otter’s and glinted a pale silver when the moon hit him. His red eyes glowed like a pair of twin fires in the night.   
“‘help’ is a strong word.” The King of the Cats replied.   
“Then what are you doing?” Mabel answered, “Whose side are you on?”   
The cat was silent for a moment, before his teeth glinted as he exposed them in one of his horrific smiles. 

“Side? I thought it was obvious. I’m on my side.” The cat said with a snorting laugh. “Though he tries to convince me otherwise.” It added softly under its breath though it wasn’t that difficult for Mabel to hear.   
“Whose He? That ghost boy…Damien?” Mabel asked, though she fumbled over the old name she had once called the boy, it felt so foolish now, like a girl playing dress up but what else was she to call him?   
The cat said nothing and Mabel sighed. 

“First you say nothing and let me think you’re an ordinary cat. Then when you do talk, turns out you have nothing useful to say.”   
“Oh please.” The cat scoffed. “You didn’t call me king for nothing. I was never ordinary. But fine, if you want some advise how about this: the seventh son is always the sweetest, don’t stare too long into the moon or he’ll stare back and no one likes being stolen from.”   
He paused as if catching his breath, and Mabel looked down at him. He had his ears perked, his eyes were wide and he was surveying his surroundings with a bone chilling alertness.   
“What?” Mabel asked. 

“Don’t you hear that?” The King of the Cats whispered, tilting his ears this way and that but Mabel could hear nothing beyond the cricket chirp.   
“What is it?” Mabel pressed, she crouched beside the cat, until his red eyes were leveled with her own and she could see herself reflected there, a pair of red hued Mabel’s swimming in pools of blood. 

“Nothing perhaps.” The cat murmured, his tail flicked back and forth in thought. “Though I doubt it.” He blinked a few times up at Mabel, his pupils dilating in the poor lighting. “I’d hurry if I were you.” Was all he said before he slinked off into the shadows and became one of them, vanishing with little more than a faint rustle of leaves and a parting wave of silky black tail. Mabel stared off into the distance, she thought of Dipper, she thought of the ring on her finger and the charms in her backpack, none of which Dipper had and straightening took off at a run through the forest, heedless of the roots that snagged at her feet, at the twigs that took a swipe at her hair. 

She didn’t notice how her lungs burned, her legs carried her flawlessly like she was flying, fear gave her wings and the thought of her brother in trouble made her heart quicken and made her legs move faster. She wasn’t sure if she trusted the cat, but she couldn’t get his warning out of her head, or his advise. The seventh son? The moon? What did those have to do with anything? She threw a glance up into the sky, where the moon was a silver eye watching her and quickly she looked away, not because of the cat’s advise…of course not. 

And what did he mean about stealing? That wasn’t so much a riddle more a statement of a fact. Steal what? Was she supposed to steal something? Or keep something from being stolen?   
A scream split the night, shattering the air like glass. Mabel’s heart leapt to her throat, the scream was the first sound she had ever heard upon entering this world, the voice belonged to the one that had followed her steps, the other half of her soul and her throat ripped itself raw with an unused scream to match his. Dipper was in trouble and here she was chatting with old crones and cats. 

She almost called out for him but thought better of it, remembering her Uncle Ford’s advise to assess the situation, don’t let emotions make your decisions for you. Think. Think.   
But she was a little busy twisting her spine in the effort of moving, her legs screamed, adrenaline silenced them. Red shaded the edges of her vision, intent gritted her teeth until she thought they might clip and fly away. She leapt over a fallen log and almost ran head long into the clearing. She saw Dipper standing in the clearing, holding a sword and facing…nothing.

She slowed her run to a stop and was about to take a step forward to greet her brother but she forced herself to pause, to wait. She ducked behind the trees and watched as her brother turned to grin down at the trembling little Clive where he had fallen amongst the shrubbery.   
Mabel ducked behind the nearest tree, her heart beating wildly in her chest. Her brother’s eyes were a dark shade of red and his grin was the stuff of nightmares. 

“Clive, go fetch my sister, will you?” Dipper spoke but no, it wasn’t Dipper, couldn’t be Dipper, his voice was all malice and cruelty, cunning and sharp edges and it sounded slightly off. Like someone wearing a Dipper shaped mask and speaking through a Dipper voice filter. If anything it sounded more like Damien. Her gut lurched, her head reeled, her ring almost slipped from her finger it was so slick with sweat. Damien had crawled inside her brother and was wearing him like a coat. “Tell her I’ll see her at the show tonight.” The words sneaked in between Mabel’s bones as terror gripped her soul. Did he know she was there? 

She clutched the ring her aunt had given her all the tighter, waiting for the moment that he would peer around the tree trunk and gaze at her with those stranger’s eyes. But the footsteps she heard was fainter, carrying her brother away and she decided that that was probably worse. She gulped, peering around the tree trunk in time to see Clive scuttling past her as fast as his fingers could carry him. 

Mabel crouched quickly snatched up the hand as it trembled and quivered and crawled its blue flaking nails over her knuckles.   
“Clive, stop that!” Mabel hissed, “It’s me! What happened?”   
Clive paused for a moment, registering Mabel before he began to sign frantically.   
‘theweapontheweaponwasatraptheghostwaswaitingjumpedinsideofDippertriedtostopbutcouldntgetoutandImjustahandwhatwasIsupposedtodo???!!!’ 

“Clive, Clive calm down!” Mabel snapped, giving the hand a vicious little shake. “I can’t understand you when you talk like that. Get a hold of yourself!”   
But Clive was a trembling mess in her hands, occasionally signing the phrase ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I don’t want your sparkly lotion anymore.’  
Mabel threw him a curious glance, wondering what that could mean but decided against it.   
“Go back to the cave and tell Auntie what’s happened please. 

Tell Grunkle Stan and Ford to come to the Circus.” Mabel sighed, looking after the place Dipper’s body had vanished. “We’re definitely going to get grounded now. Thanks a lot Dipper. Just had to go and get yourself possessed again, didn’t you?”   
She let Clive go and the hand scuttled a few frantic steps back towards the blissful safety of his homely cave, paused and scurried back.   
‘What about you?’ He sighed. 

“What about me?” Mabel asked grimly. “Didn’t you hear that creep crouching inside my brother? I’ve got a show to go to.” She straightened and stepped out from behind the trees, as much as her legs trembled to do. She looked back to see Clive watching her for a second longer. She smiled and tucked her hair behind one ear.   
“Go on, Clive. I’ll be fine.” She said with reassurance. She clutched her bag tightly, the ring gleamed on her white knuckles. Without further encouragement, the hand vanished and Mabel was left alone. 

She sighed and walked up to the wrought iron gate. Longing for her grappling hook buried in the wall of the Shack, she threw her bag over the fence and heaved herself up after it with only a little difficulty. When you were friends with Robbie, you ended up climbing a weird amount of fences.   
She dropped over the other side with a soft little thump and crouching listened. There was the ice inside her joints again, stiffening her and paralyzing her with fear, it made her think smiling faces lurked in the shadows, it made her imagine she heard a triangle’s laughter rattling like bone wind chimes. 

She breathed, slowly and carefully as she was suddenly aware of heat radiating from her hand, thawing her joints and chasing her fears back far enough for her to think. She sighed and smiled at the black glittering ring and silently thanked the old crone. She was definitely getting all of Mabel’s collection of Bachelor when she got home. She straightened and readjusting her backpack onto her shoulders she inched herself along the blackened tented walls. Was she watched, their spider web patterned cloth walls seemed to breath, billowing and rocking in an unfelt breeze. Lights, greens and purples and ruddy shades of orange drifted from inside the tents, whispers of ghosts could be heard moaning on the wind. 

Stall doors creaked and banged against one another, a wheel of an overturned forgotten cart squeaked. Mabel looked up and saw the stars had been blotted out of the sky along with the moon and the silhouettes of the trees. Beyond the gently swaying, glowing tents there seemed nothing but an endless abyss. She shuddered, a chill premating her bones but she kept walking, for she couldn’t shake the impression that there was no path other than forward, to turn back was to step over the edge of a cliff and see what death awaited her at the bottom. 

There were no ghosts, no people, not a soul she could see as she turned every corner, expecting to see some ghost army with swords blazing waiting for her. The tent flaps fluttered unattended, a sharp craw of a crow overhead. She tilted her head back and watched the phantom shape, trailing tendrils of black mist behind it like it had recently been caught on fire, circle in front of the glowing lights and coming to land before the black metal tree in the center of the pavilion. It glowed with a haunting purple light that seemed to permeate its metal shell, the way a flashlight glows red through your fingers when you place your hand over its head. 

The crow her eyes had followed settled into the tallest branches with its fellows, a score of black crows with rippling feathers of black fire fluttering off of them. There eyes were a glowing shade of hateful red and when they looked down at her they smiled with sharpened teeth. She shuddered. In the tree were men and girls hanging from ropes by their twisted purple necks, their tongues hanging out and their feet dangling under them uselessly. They were still dressed in their costumes from the circus, glittering sequins winking in the ghoulish light, red ribbons hanging off of their undone shoes, their hair swimming around them like they were underwater. 

When Mabel entered the pavilion, their eyes, red, glinting and wicked, trailed her. She stood still for a moment, waiting for the members of the black tree to do something, waiting for the crows to sound an alarm or for the ghosts to step down from their nooses and ring her neck but they didn’t. They watched her and swung quietly in the breeze like summer lanterns and did little more. One of the crows ruffled its feathers at her and let loose a little craw and Mabel started but nothing more happened. She walked passed the tree, the eyes followed her as she went. She breathed a deep sigh to calm her nerves, passed stalls of rotten candy apples and chocolate mice that were squirming and squeaking their way to freedom. 

Black widows hung in doorways and busied themselves with cocoons that seemed big enough for cats or small dogs. Somewhere she could the silvery scraping of a knife being sharpened and a shrill despairing female laughter rattled in the night that made Mabel clutch at her chest for fear her heart might make a break for it. She pressed forward, despite the maze of tents that could be housing her brother, she didn’t pause. She knew exactly where he was going to be.   
The main tent, like everything else in the circus seemed warped somehow. 

It was slanted to the side, like a melting ice cream cake, pulling its cords taunt. It’s main flap stood open and red heinous light bled onto the pathway like a gaping mouth, beckoning her forward. She remembered Dipper telling her a story about a little bird that cleans the crocodile’s teeth in Africa, the only thing that stops the crocodile from closing its mouth is the fact that the crocodile would like his teeth cleaned more than he would like a bite sized meal. As Mabel stepped closer, she knew how the bird felt, except she didn’t have a teeth cleaning service…did she? She hesitated, inching herself away from the gaping mouth and thinking, thinking how she could be like that little bird. 

If she could give the Ringmaster something that he wanted more than he wanted to kill her and her brother…but what did he want? He’d been looking for something in the Shack, maybe if she found out what that was…  
She ducked around back, to where she had watched the Ringmaster abuse the ghost boy. This door seemed especially less trap-like, darkened and closed. The ghost boy knew she knew about this way, did the Ringmaster? 

Would the ghost boy tell his master? For some reason the ghost boy had the tendency to withhold information on occasion. Perhaps she’d luck out with him again and he wouldn’t have told anyone. He was a crocodile with his mouth open and Mabel had to trust he wouldn’t snap his jaw closed. She took a deep breath and stepped into the tent. 

Shadows were all around her, angled against the bleeding red light. She was under the bleachers, pressed against the piles of ropes, the crates and the stage props. She saw the ghost boy’s sickle leaned up casually against a crate. It gleamed wickedly like it was smiling at her and she shuddered.  
“So… this is our little intruder.” Mabel froze, terror gripping her for a moment. The Ringmaster’s voice was distant but it echoed and project itself like the voice of pro performer. 

“Yes.” Dipper’s voice answered and daring to look between the bleachers, Mabel saw the Ringmaster seated on a lopsided throne perched precariously on heap of gold and jewels, stacks of paper money, rings and watches all mismatched and thrown together like a classic bad guy villain layer. Even including the heaps of moldering bones and grinning skulls that spat gold coins from the fractured jaws, twisted broken forms half buried in the treasure like a prize themselves as they lay strewn amongst the horde like a great battle had commenced with no defined leader or victor.

Mabel shuddered, hadn’t she heard from somewhere that Vikings had killed a slave or two to bury with their horde so that their ghost would be doomed to protect the treasure forever? She shook her head, best not to think about it. At the foot of the throne stood her brother, in his arms he held the sword, flaming and greedy. The Ringmaster got up from the throne and slide down the mountain with a cascade of coins ringing clean silvery notes before the Ringmaster slightly lost his balance, tumbling with a short little cry back a step on his mountain of coins before he straightened and righted himself, caught himself with the grace of one attempting the appearance that they had intended such a mistake all along.

Mabel frowned at the Ringmaster, her eyes widening as she thought of her Grunkle Ford’s words. The thing he had said earlier about ghosts being made of mist, being able to control their physical density. It occurred to her that she had never seen any of the performers stumble before. Everything they did, they did with grace and purpose, the kind of thing that would occur when your body was nothing but a manifestation of your will and thought. Besides, ghost could fly couldn’t they? She had never seen the Ringmaster do so...he also couldn’t understand the whispered, creaking, creeping language the ghosts spoke when addressing each other. 

Mabel almost gasped as the realization struck her like lightening. The Ringmaster wasn’t a ghost, his body wasn’t thought and mist but flesh and blood like her own. If he was cut his blood would be ruby red, she was certain of it. But why then were the ghosts listening to him? Why did the ghost boy let the Ringmaster hurt him? Maybe ghosts had more patience than she did but she wouldn’t tolerate such disgusting management for too long. Not to mention there were so many of them. She thought of all the performers in the final act, of all the ghosts that had raided the Shack. They were a fleet of sharks, somehow being controlled by a goldfish. 

Or was the Ringmaster just a better bird to these crocodiles that she ever could be?   
Dipper let out a weak little chuckle that ended in a cute little snort. Her heart leapt to her throat, she recognized that laughter. It wasn’t the ghost boy’s, it was Dipper’s, true, honest, so much her brother that it made the marrow of her bones ache.   
The Ringmaster looked down at Dipper, his nostrils flared and his kohl painted eyes grew wide.   
“Something funny?” The Ringmaster asked, darkness filling his voice, his knuckles were white on his staff. 

“Yeah. You.” Dipper said, not Dipper’s voice but Dipper himself, she knew him and Mabel’s heart soared. The Ringmaster’s eyes narrowed.   
“I see you don’t have a firm handle on our guest here, ghost boy.” The Ringmaster said.   
“I…I’m trying…” The words gritted their way from between Dipper’s teeth as the parasite inside him spoke. “He’s proving difficult.”   
“You get out of my body and I’ll consider being more pleasant, fowl murderer.” Dipper growled, his voice low and dangerous. 

“I didn’t-” The ghost boy demanded but the Ringmaster stopped him.   
“You’re not afraid Dipper?”   
“Why should I be?” Dipper answered. “Last I checked I wasn’t afraid of clowns.”   
Mabel beamed at the gall of her brother. She hadn’t seen him have this much courage in ages. She inched herself forward, closer to the scene, trying to think of a good plan but as of yet coming up empty. 

The Ringmaster, lifting Dipper’s chin to examine his face, smiled.   
“Well, then we’ll have to fix that, won’t we?” He paused turning the face this way and that.   
“Ghost boy, does our little spiteful guest have any information of use to our quest?”   
There was a pause, in which Mabel could see her brother’s face, twisting with varying emotions that ranged from pain to hatred to fear.   
“I…” Dipper’s parasite responded. “I think…it’s in a dice bag. A glass eye.” 

Mabel did gasped audibly that time. The Ringmaster’s head snapped around in her direction and she ducked behind a pile of cords, her heart hammering in her chest. That little white marble with the slit down the center of it like an eye? They were looking for that? Why? Mabel didn’t know and for the moment she frankly didn’t care. Dipper thought it was still in the dice bag, so the ghost boy, poking and prodding his way through her poor brother’s brain also thought that the marble was in the dice bag. It wasn’t anymore. 

Mabel had seen the marble during a rowdy game of shoots and ladders, in fact it had rolled across the table towards her. The white wasn’t truly white, it was opal, it gleamed with iridescent ripples that shocked its body whenever the light winked off of it and the slit for its eye was a beautiful slit of inky black where tiny little triangles twirled. Mabel could imagine it so intimately because she had stolen it from her uncle’s dice bag two summer’s ago. 

Since then she had stitched it as an eye into her multi-bear stuffy because the marble had been so pretty and keeping it close to her had given her good dreams of vivid places where apple trees stood in the middle of a sea with apple bobbing on the waters glassy surface, where waterfalls cascaded off of floating islands and golden flowers of ruby and sapphire curled around wrought iron fences. Currently, the bear was lying on her bedroom floor back at the Shack. The thing a crazy ringmaster and a whole horde of ghosts were looking for was embedded into one of her stuffys! It seemed so…bizarre. But that gave her an idea that sent her digging into her bag, praying and hoping until with a grin she found it, her recent gift to her Auntie Witch. White nail polish. 

“Ah, excellent.” The Ringmaster said, sounding wildly pleased. “And you think you can show me where this little bag is?”   
“I…” Both the ghost boy and Dipper seemed to waver, causing Mabel to look up from her scheming. “I don’t…I don’t want…” The Ringmaster’s smile, as fake as it ever was, faltered.   
“What’s that? Has the human been talking to you?”   
Mabel smirked, picturing the internal debate that was written all over her brother’s face. 

“Has he been sneaking little lies into your head, boy?” The Ringmaster asked and frankly Mabel wasn’t sure which boy he was addressing, the ghost or her brother as the Ringmaster leaned closer to her brother, a grin peeling back his face to the slimy pink of his gums. Mabel’s smile dropped. He had a glint in his eyes that Mabel feared, her fingers began to fly through her work. Dipper swayed slightly, as though a desire urged him to pull away but his feet were nailed to the floor. 

“There are other routes we can explore child, if mere possession will not subdue you. If ghosts cannot control you perhaps you might enjoying becoming one yourself.” In an almost tender fashion, the Ringmaster thumped Dipper’s jaw, running a nail down his cheek before closing his fingers around her brother’s gulping, panicking sweat laced throat. Dipper’s red demon eyes were his, his free hand trembled, the sword in his other twitched and swayed as if Dipper was trying, desperately trying to lift it, itching to put up some resistance but they ultimately his arms remained slack and compliant, unable to do anything more than watch as the Ringmaster slowly choked the life out of him. 

Mabel stood, stepping out of the shadows, panic setting her feet in motion before she could properly plan as Ford would have wanted her to, before she exactly knew what she had to offer the crocodiles she stepped out from behind the bleachers, her knees trembling and sweat coating her upper lip.   
“Stop.” She croaked hoarsely. The Ringmaster hardly threw her a glance, he lowered his hand as though he’d been expecting her all along. She shuddered, realizing he probably had.   
“Ah, our guest of honor.” The Ringmaster said, turning to face her with glittering eyes. “What a lovely surprise.” 

“Let my brother go.” Mabel said, she hesitated, her hands tucked behind her back as she stepped closer. She shoes gritted the sand of the stage, the reddish light was all round her, lighting up her frame. She felt like she was on display, about to put on the world’s grandest show. “I know what you’re looking for. The glass eye, it’s not in the dice bag back at the Shack. Dipper thinks that’s where it is but he’s wrong because I stole it to…to turn it into a ring.” 

She held open her hand and held her aunt’s ring a loft for both the Ringmaster and Dipper’s body to behold, hoping they didn’t notice how the white hide of the gem glinted from freshly wet paint, hope they didn’t notice from this distance the paint smearing the edges of the gem’s metal claws or the glob that had gotten on the inside of her thumb, she twisted her thumb into her palm in order to hide it. The Ringmaster’s eyes widened a fraction, his smile dipped and what remained was a look of raw insatiably hunger, like he might tear her own hand off with his teeth if she might hold onto the gem a second longer. After the initial shock of seeing the ring, his eyes narrowed in suspicion. 

“How convenient that you would produce such a valuable artifact the moment your brother’s life was on the line. How thoughtful of you to bring it in case this exact situation might occur. Wasn’t it thoughtful of her?” The Ringmaster asked Dipper, Dipper’s face remained blank and expressionless. But, as if Dipper had told a joke, the Ringmaster laughed and casually threw an arm over Dipper’s shoulder, snaked his hand around Dipper’s jaw and tilted his head slightly the side. Dipper’s red ruby eyes could have been made of glass, gazing at her, threw her with a controlled passive expression.

Mabel shrugged, trying to sound careless. “I kept it in my jewelry case until I thought my house was being broken into. Then I grabbed it. It’s such a lovely thing, I didn’t want to part with it, dreaming with it on my finger always took me to such strange places. Places with a willow tree made of purple metal, with pink stain glass patterns on its leaves that rocked and chimed like a symphony when the wind blew. Cities of lapis lazuli cobblestones and floating buildings connected to each other with ropes that messenger boys and girls with-”

“-red feathers tied in their hair running up and down with such skill, they’re like monkeys and they don’t fear to fall.” The Ringmaster finished, the hunger returning to his eyes, he dropped his arm off Dipper’s shoulder and took a step closer to Mabel. “You saw that city? Where glass men and woman dot I on ink pages and crones no bigger than dolls ride with saddle and rein on cats and dogs? Where lantern flowers bloom in the evening, glowing bright shades of beautiful hues before floating free of their vines and lifting into the sky? Where you can always hear the sea, you can see it from the floating buildings, covered in vines and plum blossoms, and its like a sea of glittering sapphires?” 

A strange expression was coming over the Ringmaster’s face as he spoke word for word Mabel’s dreams, one of pain and longing. The cruelty and cleverness on that ugly face with too much makeup and not enough sun for a moment melted away and he was nothing but a man who had dreamed the same dream as Mabel and had found beauty in it. She nodded.   
“Y-yeah….how did you…” 

“That city.” The Ringmaster said, his eyes alight with real emotion, glazed over with thoughts thousands of years old. “Is my home, little girl. You never saw a more beautiful city. Every wall, every cobblestone was art, every corner was music, every shop was laughter and every night was a blissful song, dance, smiling girls with painted collarbones and the fresh scent of flowers and baked bread and…” He stopped himself, blinking at her with a sharp jolt back to reality. He looked around his heaping piles of gold; the half toppling tent and the red ghoulish light that surrounded him, blinking free the memories of the city of his childhood. He shook himself, looking down at Mabel with a new look of disgust, anger and sadness. 

“You saw the city, you a silly little girl saw the city I’ve been looking for since-” He stopped himself and turned quickly away, glowering at Dipper with a scoff. “Get the gem from your dearest sister, will you boy?” Dipper took a step forward and Mabel, without thinking, took a step back and closed her hand shut on the wet paint and pressed the ring to her chest.   
“I’ll give you the eye if you let my brother go. He’s of no use to you now that you have what you want.”   
The Ringmaster carefully climbed back up his treasure heap, kicking crowns and gems roughly aside with detestation before roughly collapsing onto the throne. He paused, studying Mabel with a look of contempt. 

“Perhaps…” He said, scratching his chin to think of it. Dipper slowly took another begrudging step forward and another one like weights were fastened to his ankles and every step was struggle. “But then again…I could always use a new pair of ghost children for the circus. Wouldn’t that be cute? Then you and your little ghost boy could be together forever.”   
“I-” Mabel faltered, taking a step back and back until her legs hit the bleachers. Dipper kept stepping forward, his hand reaching out to take the ring from her, the flames danced off his flaming sword with wicked delight. 

“What?” The Ringmaster demanded, “Are you not going to give me the eye? But then you see, I’ll just kill you and take it from your burn and crumpled little hand. You really should have thought this through a bit better, girl.” He giggled, and Mabel frowned.   
“You want it, Dipper?” She demanded, peeling back the white sticky mess in her hand like a melted marshmallow. Dipper’s hand faltered, his red eyes flickered with confusion. 

“Then go ahead and take it!” She cried, a grabbing his wrist, shoved the ring down onto his hand. Alarmed, Dipper wrenched his hand from her grasp, blinked at the melted paint to reveal the black stone underneath planted firmly on his quivering hand. A humming started up that rattled in Mabel’s ribcage, then the ring exploded into tendrils of black fire and a high pitch scream engulfed her brother.


	6. Unusual Alliance

Dipper was pretty sure he was dreaming but he couldn’t be certain. The chains that dug into his wrists felt real, their weight was exhausting, they sank his shoulders, caused his knees to buckle. For some reason, keeping his head aloft and his eyes open was a difficulty. He longed for sleep but he wasn’t sure where he’d go if he slept. He was already in a dream, how much deeper inside himself could he go.

There was someone else there with him, mumbling and whispering, he could hear him and it was a voice he knew, the voice that had taunted him earlier but with significantly less menace in his voice. It was the same phrase over and over again that he was repeating, Dipper was getting tired of it.   
“Tucker…Sam….I’m sorry…” 

“Will you stop?” Dipper snapped, forcing his eyes open, he wasn’t sure when he had closed them. There was another boy in chains next to him, stooped and crumpled that made Dipper think of Atlas and the weight he bore. The boy raised his head weakly, his white hair tumbling into his bright green eyes. Those eyes startled him, not for their alternation in colour but for how much softer they seemed, how lonely and desolate and sad. 

“I didn’t mean to.” The boy repeated, his eyes pleading with Dipper for comfort, for assurance, to tell him his sins were forgiven. Dipper frowned.   
“Why did you kill them then?” He demanded, “If you didn’t mean to. Hell, if you’re looking for redemption, why don’t you leave me, my sister, my town alone? That’d be a good place to start.”   
The boy blinked at Dipper in surprise, his eyebrows heightened themselves and his eyes coming into clearly focus as if fully registering that Dipper was even there. 

“Why…?” The boy slurred, thought seemed difficult for him. “Why did I…I didn’t.”   
“You didn’t?” Dipper asked, “Or you did? Which one is it, buddy?”   
“I didn’t…I didn’t want to. He made me.” The boy said, shaking his head helplessly, his words tumbling back into incoherent mumbles of. “He made me…I’m sorry, I’m sorry…Tucker…Sam…”

“Hey. Stay focused, will you?” Dipper was growing impatient but his impatience stirred his senses, allowed him to wake up. He was standing in a tent, the grand tent. His body anyway. And the Ringmaster was talking but he wasn’t listening. For some reason in the light the world seemed slightly different. More sharp angles to look like someone had sketched the world using charcoal and deeper hues like the said painter had mingles all his colours with black. There were faint echoing lines of blue mist and fluttered about the ceiling and in and out of the tent’s walls. 

He wasn’t sure what those were. They fascinated him. But he could only notice them out of the corners of his eyes. For his gaze was stony and he was staring straight ahead at the Ringmaster’s staff. The crystal ball at the end of the staff wasn’t clear anymore. It was curled with crackling trails of smoke of red and black. As he watched lightening flashed a vicious green hue. He thought he saw the flutter of black birds; it was like gazing into a stirring pot where hurricanes were made. It was entrancing, just gazing into made Dipper feel like he was falling, being sucked into it by his navel. 

With a flinch he retreated back into himself, where he was staring at a green-eyed boy watching him carefully.   
“That’s the ‘he’, right?” Dipper asked. “The Ringmaster.”   
The boy nodded miserably.  
“He’s controlling you? How? The staff?”   
Again, the boy nodded.

“He made me.” The boy repeated, but for once Dipper understood. He blinked at the boy, at the chains weighing him down and felt a kinship towards him.   
“Is that your excuse for everything?” Dipper asked scornfully. The boy stared at him as if Dipper had sprouted a second head.   
“Look,” Dipper pressed on, “It doesn’t matter if he made you, you still did it. It was still your actions, not his.”   
“But I can’t-”

“Don’t give me that bullshit.” Dipper scowled. “You watched your body kill your friends, you watched as your family grew afraid of the monster he was turning you into. You watched. You did nothing. Are you really going to do the same thing again? I know you have a say in what you do, you showed me that when you protected my sister and I, so don’t give me that crap.”   
The pair of green eyes widened.   
“Your sister?”   
“Yeah, my sister Mabel, do you remember her?” The boy’s eyes pinched themselves with pain, tears leaked from the corners of his eyes. 

“Stop crying and focus.” Dipper pressed. “Mabel was nice to you, despite how much I advised against it, Mabel likes you. Are you going to let her get hurt because you couldn’t bring it upon yourself to fight him?”   
The Ringmaster was still talking, he had forgotten what his lips were saying, Dipper thought it had something to do with that little glass eye. The Ringmaster took a step closer, curling an icy hand around Dipper’s throat. Panic fluttered in Dipper’s chest, his heart was pounding, he screamed at his limbs to move, he had a sword in his hands that was inching to be used, if he only could lift his hand but an inch maybe two but there was nothing. 

“Come on!” Dipper screamed, “He’s going to kill me!”   
The boy’s eyebrows furrowed with worry, looking at Dipper as though longing for the strength to stand.   
“I…I…don’t die…Please…” the boy begged.   
“Then do something!”   
A voice, uncertain and desperate, cut through the air like a knife, Dipper felt as though he’d just dropped from a great height as he saw his sister standing at the edge of the circle of light.   
“Mabel!” Dipper screamed, “No! Run, get out of here!” What was she doing here? 

She had followed him, he realized with ever mounting horror. He had tried to keep her out of this and she had come anyway. He wanted to fill his gaze with plead, his voice with protests, he wrenched at his chains, slogged against the haze like he was wadding through a pool. She was holding something, something white and black that looked like an eye. Wait…what? How did she get that? Why was she carrying around the little marble eye? He reeled from this new information, realizing just how royally screwed they were. Why would she bring it in here? What was stopping the Ringmaster from killing the pair of them after he had the marble. 

“Mabel…don’t!” He whimpered, something seemed to stir itself awake in his green-eyed prison mate. He blinked, his eyes shinning with a florescent hue to match his blood.   
“Mabel?” the ghost boy asked, straightening up against the weight of his chains. “Mabel?”   
“Yes, Mabel, my sister, remember? The one who likes you?” Dipper snapped, “She’s here and she’s about to get the pair of us killed!”   
“No, no…” The boy said, shaking his head, bright green droplets of blood falling off his chin like brutal tears. “Mabel! Mabel run!” The boy shouted, weakly at first but with growing vigor. 

“Run!”   
Dipper’s body was walking forward.  
“Help me!” Dipper pleading, wrestling against his restraints, the boy gazed at him steadily for a moment and began to wrench and writhe too. Dipper’s feet paused, their pace slowing to dragged inches but were not stopped altogether.   
“We shouldn’t…” The ghost boy whimpered.   
“Shut up and keep pushing!” Dipper snapped.   
“No, no, you don’t understand Dipper, he’s here, he’ll hurt us.” 

Dipper paused, weariness etched into his being like a fresh wound. He threw the boy a confused glance.   
“The Ringmaster?”   
“No, no, not him. HIM.” The boy repeated looking over Dipper’s shoulder expectantly. Dipper’s expression dropped into shock as he stared at the boy. A slow insidious horror creeping over him.   
“Who…who else is here?” He asked but he knew the answer. He could feel him crouching, leering, a wicked grin in the darkness that he recognized, blood red eyes and silver sharpened sickle. 

Dipper’s eyes widened, the creature flashed him a feral grin. Black tentacles of smoke issued from between his teeth like he was contemplating breathing fire. The green-eyed ghost boy whimpered as the red eyed one raised his sickle to cleave Dipper’s head from his shoulders.  
Then, a really, really weird sensation came over him. It was unpleasant of course, that was to expected when suddenly all around you there were flames. But it was uncomfortable like wearing one of Pacifica’s dress suits, or finding yourself in a Grunkle Stan certified headlock. Not ideal but not unbearable. The ghosts around him though, both of green eyes and of red, took a very different and perhaps more conventional approach to suddenly being set a fire. 

They screamed, thrashing as their forms began to crackle and buzz like the type of TV signal you’d expect in a desert. Then, a hand was on his shirt collar, pulling him through the haze and through his restraints like they were made of jelly, not exactly a smooth transition to freedom but completely manageable where once it had been impossible. The sensation of stepping off a crowded elevator flooded him as he reeled and stumbled into his sister’s arms. He blinked, dazed and disoriented as his sister set him gently down on the real sand of the center stage in the real grand tent. He blinked, a moment ago he’d been nothing but a wisp of a dream, screaming in the back of his own mind and now....

“Dipper, Dipper, are you alright?” Mabel shouted over the screams of the ghost boy. Dipper flexed his fingers and looked up to see his former prison mate writhing in the air, suspended on nothing as his form threatened to crackle itself into nothing, like a sputter candle drowning in wax. Dipper’s eyes widened, thinking of the poor boy in chains, he turned to Mabel.   
“Get the Ringmaster’s staff!” He demanded, his sister, crazy and brilliant with her hair askew and her cheeks rather pale, looked at him with curiosity.   
“What?” 

“The staff, get the staff it’s how he’s controlling the ghosts!” Dipper shouted, “I’ll help him!”   
He pointed to the ghost boy, Mabel looked dumbfounded for a moment looking between her newly revived brother and the thing that she just pulled him free from, Dipper didn’t wait to see her reaction, he ran towards the ghost boy where he hung suspended in the air, screaming and thrashing. He skidded to a stop just before the boy, wavered and stretched out a hand to him. The boy, his form still crackling, threw his eyes open to stare at Dipper with contracted enraged pupils. 

With a haggard cry of rage and anguish, the boy hurled himself at Dipper, clawing at him with torn white gloves, green smeared hair falling into his face, lips painted green gritting sharp teeth. Dipper held up his hands to ward off the boy’s attacks.   
“Stop!” He shouted, “It’s me.”   
“Kill him!” The Ringmaster howled, he raised his staff, Mabel was making a break for the master as all around Mabel the skeletons began to stir and rise, wriggling from their golden encasement, empty eye sockets and barely bound joint stumbling to their feet and staggering towards his sister.

“Mabel!” He shouted in a panic as hands closed around his shirt collar and he was hoisted into the air. Dipper gasped, watching the ground of the tent shrink away from him, watching his sister as a grinning skeleton army of the dead slowly surrounded her. He twisted to look into the manic red eyes, the grinning green stained teeth.   
“It’s me!” Dipper shouted again, the wind was all around him then, his feet kicked under him helplessly. “I know you’re in there, fight him! Come on D-Danny…” The word stumbled free of his mouth suddenly, he wasn’t sure where it had came from but he knew it to be the truth, knew it to be his name. 

The red eyes widened, crackling with that unearthly fire as his form continued to waver but for once it didn’t seem to mind him. He stared at Dipper with a blank expression as the pair of them stared at each other, nose to nose, hanging over the abyss.   
“What.... did you call me?” The ghost boy said numbly, he stared, his pupils were nothing but pinpricks of ink in twin pools of blood. 

“Danny!” Dipper pressed the issue. “It’s your name, isn’t it? What you were before he made you into nothing but a puppet? Come on, I know as good as anyone what that’s like but you have to fight him.”   
“It’s…it’s hard.” The ghost boy, Danny said, looking past Dipper down where Mabel was currently using someone severed femur as a club. 

“I know, how about you don’t drop me for starters.” Dipper said, patting the boy’s hand assuredly. His hand touched the black ring that Mabel had shoved on his finger and Danny howled in pain, Dipper let out a little yelp of panic.   
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, let me help you!”   
“No.” Danny choked, clutching his burning hand to his chest in agony. “It…it helps. I can…think a bit easier.” 

“So…you’ll put me down?” Dipper asked with a bit of unease. The ground was so very far away. Danny looked at him, his form crackled, green seemed to ooze out of his every pour, down his eyebrows and over his cheeks, he didn’t seem to mind. He smiled.   
“I’ll do better than that.” For a second Dipper thought he might be falling, falling, the wind all around him, the ground rushing towards him. His stomach rose to his throat and it took him a full thirty seconds too long for Dipper to realize the ghost boy still had a hold of him, that the ground was evening out and they were flying towards Mabel. 

The boy extended his hand, and a crackle of green shot from his hand, exploding the skeletons in a ghastly fire. The boy laughed in Dipper’s ear, delighted and carefree.   
“It’s been so long…” He murmured, his voice a soft murmur in Dipper’s ear. “I remember what it was like to fly…”   
The boy pulled out of his dive and after a crackling moment to let it build up in his hand, he flung it at the skeletons like a Frisbee where it exploded into green smoke upon contact. 

Mabel whirled around, green flames circling her as she stared in shocked amazement at Dipper and the ghost boy flying together, taking out baddies like a pair of fighter pilots.   
“The staff!” Dipper shouted, and Mabel shook herself out of her shocked trance, as she stumbled up the gold heap to where the Ringmaster stood dumbfounded.   
“What’s the matter with you?” The Ringmaster shouted, looking at the ghost boy in disgust. “Obey me slave!” He waved his staff at the ghost boy and Dipper saw the boy’s face contract with a mixed look of horror, he clutched at his head as though in pain. 

“Danny, hey stay with me!” Dipper gasped, “Or…um…at least put me down, will you?”   
“Hey, leave them alone!” Mabel shouted, lunging at the staff, the Ringmaster growled, his fingers desperate to keep the staff within his grasp.   
“Get off of me, you stupid girl!” The Ringmaster screamed, “Ghosts! Get in here!”   
The wind howled, the tent walls shook, a whirl of green grinning ghouls inching from between the seams of the tent and through the flaps of the doors circled through the air around Dipper and Danny. The ghost boy’s ruby eyes widened, he looked down at Dipper. 

“I’m sorry…” He whispered hoarsely, a howling whirl of green was all around them, enveloping them like a tornado. “Dipper, don’t let me hurt your sister…”   
Dipper blinked up at the boy, scared and alone and desperate and he nodded.   
“But first you got to do a favor for me.” Danny raised to him on inquisitive eyebrow. “Don’t drop me for a second, k?” He twisted around in the ghost boy grip.   
“Mabel!” he shouted and he dropped his super cool, flaming sword. It plummeted through the rank of ghosts as they finally enveloped Dipper and Danny. 

***

Mabel screamed, loosing the ability to see her brother inside a swarm of ghosts had thrown her, just as she felt the sting of being smacked in the temple by the Ringmaster. She rolled down the golden heap, dizzy and dazed the Ringmaster approached her with a smile. Panic struck her core, the world tipped and tottered and threatened to fall away all together. Then the flaming sword buried itself in the heap of coins mere inched from Mabel’s face, slicing a cut on her cheek, it quivered in the air for a moment, humming a beautiful rhythmic note. She gritted her teeth and rose, drawing the sword just as the Ringmaster raised his staff to strike her again and she drove the sword straight through the staff’s crystal ball. 

Honestly Mabel would later admit to Dipper that she hadn’t even been aiming for the staff but the effects were astounding. There was a ear piercing, flash of bright white light and burst of energy that flung her backwards. The ghost tornado disburse like a school of fish scattered by a shark, they whizzed through the air in meandering circles, some fading on the spot, some slipping through the cracks of the tent and vanishing, but other, more formed entities hovered for a moment, blinking and astonished as the red faded from their eyes. The ghost boy was one of these creatures, still holding Dipper up from plummeting to the ground.

They slowly dipped towards the ground and Mabel got to her feet and ran towards them as Dipper yanked off the jet-black ring and flung it onto the pile of jewels. The ghost boy’s shoulders slumped, he sighed as his form solidified and when he looked up at Mabel drawing near, he looked at her with eyes glowing like freshly spilled ghost blood, like mouthwash, like mint, chilly where he had once been a flame. When he saw he, he smiled, a wide bright, elated smile as his eyes glittered, wild and free. She threw her arms around Dipper in excitement and the smile on the ghost boy’s lips died slightly. 

“Dipper,” she cried, burying her face in her brother’s neck, clinging to him like she was afraid he’d vanish again if she let him go.   
“Thanks for um…for saving me Mabel.” Dipper said shyly, pulling Mabel away to exam her at arms length, looking at the cut on her temple and cheek with worry. But she shook off his concern; she looked over at the ghost boy, who was standing a few steps away looking terribly awkward. 

“So…” Mabel began and the boy’s expression lit up with a mixture of nervous excitement.   
“I um…thank you, for freeing me. We weren’t um…we were never properly introduced. I…I’m Danny…Danny Phantom.” He held out a hand to her, paused, thought better of it and drew it back. Mabel blinked, shocked and pleased at how unlike Damien this new boy was. He peered at her from in between his eyelashes, shy but clever, cunning but kind. Then those green eyes slide past Mabel, and the smile dropped. Mabel looked over her shoulder and there was the Ringmaster, on his hands and knees, scrambling with desperate whimpers to put the pieces of the shattered orb back together.

The shards were slicing patterns through his gloves, leaving his fingers dripping droplets of red onto the golden heap. A dangerous whispered laughter, like the howl of the winter wind echoed through the air, a glinting feral grin here, a glitter of sequent train there and suddenly the shadows of the rafters were light up with a thousand glowing green candles.   
“No, no!” The Ringmaster gasped, his gaze slide from the rafters down to Dipper and Mabel, panic laced his eyes. “Help me!” He begged, getting to his feet and stumbling towards the twins. Both Dipper and Mabel felt a hand on their shoulders and a whisper on their ears.

“We need to leave now.” Danny breathed, backing away the Ringmaster, the twin followed after him.   
“Wait! Don’t leave me, I’ll-I’ll take you to the city, girl! I’ll show you the city…just…just let me see it once more! Please! Please!” The Ringmaster screamed as a wave of green descended upon him, his words of plead fading away into senseless screams. Mabel let out a gasp of surprise as she was suddenly dragged through the air, a familiar hand snagged under her waist as it was long ago, pulling her out of the grand tent and up, up, into the sky that was just begin to lighten with hues of downy grey and soft pink, the pine trees were all around her then, the town unfolded under her feet like a blanket. 

She gasped as she suddenly realized she was flying for real. She grinned, looking over at her two companions. Dipper, grinned back at her from Danny’s other arm but Danny wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at the rising sun as it shown in his eyes, let the colours of pink and orange consume him as his eyes slowly began to water.   
“Danny?” Dipper asked, concern lingering in his voice, the ghost boy blinked and shook himself out of his reverie. 

“Oh…sorry. I just…” He looked down at the town, the street lights slowly turning off, people yawning and stretching, coming out of their homes. Lawn sprinklers were starting up, the Greasy Diner was opening its doors, Robbie and Tambry were sitting on the library’s front steps staring a half stale bag of black popcorn, Manly Dan and his sons were heading to work. Danny giggled softly in delight. 

“I’m free.” He grinned and repeated it again, shouting it this time to the empty sky where there was nothing but birds and clouds and a pair of human twins to hear him. “I’M FREE!”  
Mabel laughed with him, giddy with adrenaline, they had actually done it. Dipper looked between the two of them like they were both nuts and shaking his head let out a whooping call that rang throughout the treetops, though it didn’t make any members of the Gravity Falls community raise their heads. They had seen stranger.


	7. Answers

“What the…” Wendy trailed off her words when she walked into the Mystery Shack that morning for work and found merchandise ripped from their shelves and spewed everywhere, taxidermy monsters ripped apart or pined to the wall, there was a sword embedded in the counter and cardboard spear heads buried in the wall, the vending machine’s contents had been raided and chips and half melted candy pieces were staining the tapestry. She looked to Dipper for answers and Dipper, with dark circles ringing his eyes looked up at her from sweeping. 

“Don’t ask.” Dipper groaned, his eyelids felt like they were made of lead and now that the adrenaline had worn off, he realized just how much everything ached and all he really wanted was to go upstairs and sleep for the next century.   
“About time you got here.” Stan snapped at Wendy, throwing her a broom, which she caught numbly. “I think one of the squirrel creatures is in the rafters somewhere. Go find it will you.”   
“I thought you weren’t my boss anym-” Wendy began but stopped at the glare that Stan shot her, his blood shot sleepless eyes enough to curdle milk. “Alright, off I go.” She said, with attempted cheerfulness. 

“Wendy!” Mabel gasped, having hyped herself up on three shots of Mabel juice, was now a burning ball of artificially induced energy. Dipper kept on wondering when it would be her moment to crash as she plowed into the room with a mop and bucket, glitter staining her hair and a smile brimming from her cheeks. “You will not believe what happened last night! It turns out that the circus people were ghosts being controlled by an evil puppet master but we set them free and now the acrobat boy is my new best friend.” She said, waving with excited glee over to where Danny sat weightlessly on one of the shelves, a blanket draped over his shoulder, blinked with mild amusement as the Pines family, Soos, Mandy and Abuelita cleaned. 

“Hi.” Danny said with a small little wave. Wendy blinked at him.   
“You’re a ghost?” She asked mildly. Danny shrugged.   
“Yup.”   
Wendy nodded, “Sweet. Rock on ghost freak.” Then she turned away and headed in search for a ladder to get rid of the demon squirrel problem.   
“Hey, pasty punk.” Stan snapped, “You gonna sit there while we clean up the mess your friends made, eh? What do we look like? A cleaning service for ghost parties?” Stan said, shaking yellow rubber gloves at Danny. “Get working!” 

Danny made to rise but Mabel waved him to stay.   
“Grunkle Stan, Danny has just been through a traumatic experience. He’s in shock, would you like some cocoa Danny?” Mabel asked sweetly. Danny opened his mouth to respond, his eyes trailing to a glaring Stan and slowly shook his head.   
“I…I’m not that traumatized Mabel, really. And thank you for the blanket but I can’t really feel cold...” He shrugged his blanket off by letting his form turn misty and letting the blanket fall onto the shelf again. 

Dipper watched him, quietly fascinated, and when he looked over his Grunkles, he saw them staring at Danny with a similar look.   
“I’ve never had the opportunity to study a docile ghost before.” Ford said, yanking his harpoon free from the wall before walking over to the shelf where Danny perched. Panic fluttered in his eyes, looking from the harpoon to Ford, the boy darted up in the air and hovered back near the corner of the far wall. 

“Thanks but no thanks. I don’t do examination tables.” Danny said, a hint of worry lacing his voice. Ford tried to flash him a comforting smile. “I’m not going to do that!” He said, placing a hand on his chest aghast.   
“Great Uncle Ford.” Dipper piped up, “You might want to lower your harpoon if you want to convey harmlessness.”   
Ford blinked and quickly took his advise, Danny shoulders relaxed slightly but he still hovered carefully out of Ford’s reach. 

“How about an interview then? A DNA sampling?”   
Danny twisted his face into a look of discomfort.   
“I…don’t like handing out my DNA, sorry.”   
“Come on, Danny. We’re not going to hurt you.” Mabel said soothingly, Danny looked down at her and smiled softly.   
“Alright, forget Fordy’s idea then, why don’t you pay for the mess you and your goonies made and do some tricks for the tourists today.” Grunkle Stan said roughly, stepping in front of his brother with a greedy glint in his eye that made both Danny and Dipper openly shudder.

“Grunkle Stan, Danny just got out of being forced to put on shows for people, I don’t think he’ll be super eager being forced to do it again for you.” Mabel said with a protective scowl.  
“Tough luck, that kid owes me money after everything that’s been smashed.”   
Danny crooked an eyebrow at him, “Why don’t you just take the gold in the circus tent?”   
Stan’s face froze for a second. “What?”  
“Yeah, it’s the Ringmaster’s. I don’t think he’ll be needing it now. Unless some of the ghosts have taken the treasure back with them to the Ghost Zone, it’ll probably still be there.”

Stan stared blankly at Danny, and Danny stared back before Stan whirled on Soos and Mandy.   
“Soos and… Soos’ girlfriend! Get the sacks with money signs printed on them and the truck! We’ve got a hull to stash! Abuelita comes too.”  
“What why?” Mandy asked, as Soos, huffing and puffing made for the door.   
“Rule number one about swindling…er…business, Mandy.” Stan said while the little old woman situated a green visor over her eyes and headed for the door. “You don’t squeal on your partners. 

Come on, brass knuckles.” Stan said, with a air of an inside joke as he gently patted Abuelita’s shoulder as the pair of them headed for the door.   
“Stanley, that treasure might contain interesting artifacts or forensic evidence annnnnnd he’s gone.” Ford sighed, staring after the slamming front door.   
“Sooooo….” Dipper said, scratching his ear subconsciously. Danny, still casually floating in the air crossed his arms and legs like he was reclining in a chair. 

“So?” Danny asked, tilting his head to the side.   
“What’s it like being dead?”   
Danny crooked a small playful smile to the side of his face. “Fine, I guess. I’m not all that dead though.”   
“What?” Dipper asked in bewilderment.   
“Well, I am dead.” Danny clarified, “I’m just…mostly dead. Not all dead, like the other ghosts. I’m more like the cat.”   
“The King of the Cats?” Mabel piped up and Danny blinked. 

“Oh…um…yes, him. He’s kind of like me, a little bit in between, I remember he got to do a lot of what he wanted because he was…well…a cat. Try getting a cat to do anything, dead or alive, turns out to be difficult.” He smirked carelessly and Dipper felt incentivized.   
“Do you remember…” Dipper trailed off and Danny raised an eyebrow at him. 

“Do I remember what?”   
“Do you remember telling me that you could take me to the land of the dead?” Dipper blurted out, he couldn’t help it, his excitement was bubbling inside of him to overflow. Danny stared at him before his face was pinched with an awkward expression.   
“Why…would you want to go there?”   
“There’s a demon there, I need to find him. Make sure he’s good and gone. Do you know of anyway to more permanently get rid of a ghost?” Dipper spluttered, his words tumbled on top of themselves to get out of his mouth fast enough; he clenched his broom subconsciously as he waited expectantly for the boy to answer. 

Danny stared at Dipper for a long moment before floating down to hover close to the merchandise shelves again. Once freed, it seems Danny was perfectly opposed to the ground.   
“The Ghost Zone is…unpleasant. And big, most of the oldest ghosts haven’t been to all its little corners. It’s kind of like an infinite void that goes on forever. Finding one demon in that place will be difficult if you don’t have a clue where he might be. But if you do find him there are ways to…undo ghosts.” Danny explained. 

“Undo?” Ford asked, his eyes shining behind his glasses, Danny looked over at him and a flicker of unease fluttered across his face. “Oh, sorry, sorry. Pretend I’m not here. Do you want anything to make you more comfortable…Danny, is it?” Ford said, smiling happily but Danny’s gaze remained scrutinizing.  
“I’m good thanks and…yeah, undo. It’s just where the signal that makes up our forms is scrambled too much until it’ll never sort itself out again. Your essence gets ground up into molecules and disbursed into the universe. I’ve seen it happen a-a couple times, no one comes back from it.” 

Ford had whipped out a pen and was scribbling some notes on a napkin, Dipper’s heart was doing a jig in his chest, or perhaps it was all the caffeine.   
“So we could undo Bill and he’d be gone forever? He’d never, ever come back?” Dipper asked   
“Nope. Never, ever.” Danny said,   
“So how does one go about doing that?” Ford asked, and Danny’s suspicion solidified in a scowl. “Not that…I mean…I’m not going to use such a practice on you, young man.” Ford said with assurance. Danny lowered his eyelids in an exasperated expression. 

“You’ll forgive me but I don’t trust adults. Why don’t you answer one of my questions instead?”   
Ford blinked, his eyebrows raised. “Certainly, what is it?”   
“What is that little marble?”   
Ford blinked at Danny and then at Dipper’s wincing expression.   
“Marble?” Ford asked, bewildered and despite the plead Dipper was trying to inconspicuously relay to the ghost boy, his new pasty friend persisted. 

“Yeah I…sort of possessed your great nephew last night and saw it in his memories. White with a black slit down the center of it. Both Dipper and the Ringmaster thought it was something important.”   
Dipper flinched when his great uncle’s head snapped around to look at him.   
“You POSSESSED my nephew?” Ford demanded of Danny aghast. Danny’s pale cheeks flushed a light shade of green with embarrassment as he tried to keep his composure orderly. 

“Yes…” Danny stammered with uncertainty.   
Dipper had a few moments to dread the results before his uncle pounced on him. A measure tape appeared out of no where to study his arm length, a popsicle stick was shoved in his mouth while a light was shinned down his throat to stare at his uvula.   
“And are you alright, Dipper?” Ford asked, “Tell me how you’re feeling? Are you experiencing any side effects? Moments of weightlessness? Do you feel lightheaded? Or…a certain attachment to the ghost that possessed you?” Ford asked with a scrutinizing glance over at Danny.

“No, Grunkle Ford.” Dipper said with a tired groan and a roll of his eyes, swatting away his uncle’s probing hands, he threw a glance over at Mabel, who suddenly seemed extremely determined to clean a small green smug off the window.   
Ford narrowed his eyes at the two boys, folding his arms across his chest and drummed his fingers in tense thought. Then after a moment he walked over to the cashier table and from under the counter produced a little dice bag and spilled its contents on the desk. There were dice of every make and model, a troll’s tooth, a coil of twin, the infinity die case and…

“W-where is it?” Ford gasped, his eyes widened as he shifted the bags contents around on the table as if their rearrangement would tell him where the marble went. The blood drained from his face as he stared at Dipper in horror. “Did they-”  
“They didn’t, Great Uncle Ford.” Mabel said, daring to look up from her green smudge to look guilty over her shoulder at their little group.   
“Mabel? Then what happened to it?” Ford demanded, Mabel pursed her lips together, her eyes filled with fear as she turned away again and scrubbed the glass with such vigor that Dipper feared her hand might break right through. 

“Mabel…” Ford said tryingly, his hands propped on his hips.   
“Well, you weren’t using it and it was…really pretty so I just, I just borrowed it when I was making my multi-bear stuffy.”   
“It’s…it’s in your doll?” Ford said, dumbfounded and Mabel nodded. Ford’s surprised expression cooled over into something cold and distant. “Go and fetch it please Mabel.”   
Obediently, she dropped her rag and ran upstairs, a minute later returned with that heinous bear in her arms and a certain glass eye that Dipper had never paid that much attention to glinting cheerfully in the sunlight. She handed over the doll and Ford, looking over the stuffy and back at Mabel with a cross sigh, took out his knife and cut the marble free from its stitching. 

“What is it, Great Uncle Ford?” Dipper asked and for a long moment he wasn’t sure if the man was going to reply.   
“It’s…” Ford hesitated as he extracted the marble and held it up to the light. “It’s Bill Cipher’s eye. When I was building the portal, he…he told me that I needed the sight of a demon in order to navigate the dimensions, so he cut out his eye and gave it to me.”   
Dipper’s insides shriveled up in disgust as Mabel let out a small gasp of horror.   
“But…it doesn’t…it’s not…” Mabel stuttered. 

“It doesn’t look much like his eye now, no. It turned into this glass marble when he handed it over to me and he grew a new one. Holding it while you dream will give you the ability to peer into other worlds and supposedly it has the potential to be some sort of map while travelling but…as you can guess I never had a chance to test it before I was flung into inter-dimensional time and space without it. It can’t be destroyed, trust me I’ve tried. It’s coated in some kind of crystalized substance. So I kept it close, tucked in a dark little dice bag with nothing interesting to stare at except a troll’s tooth because…well…” 

“You don’t know if Bill is still watching.” Dipper said, a shudder running down his spine as he whirled on a pale Mabel. “And Mabel’s been keeping the eye in our room for two summers. Holy shit Mabel, a dream demon from the nightmare realm was watching us sleep and dress and-”  
“How do you think I feel about this? I was sleeping with that thing!” Mabel snapped, her voice crackling with panic. “I made out Chris Beckley last summer up there, on my bed and that…that THING was just lying right there!” 

Bile rose in the back of Dipper’s throat. “You made out with Chris Beckley?” He demanded horrified, “In our room?”   
Mabel threw him a bitter glance.   
“Where else was I supposed to do it? On the gift shop counter? In the living room while Grunkle Stan watches recorded episodes of Baby Fights?” 

Dipper thought he might be sick. “How about not at all? Shit Mabel, Chris? Really? He and I play Fight Fighters together!” Well, there goes that pastime.   
“Wait….What?” Danny said blankly, looking between the three of them with a horrified and confused expression. “Why…how…how did you get a demon to just hand over his eye? You were flung into inter-dimensional space?? And who’s Chris?” He said rather sharply with a glance over at Mabel who blushed. 

“He gave it to me when he was tricking me into building a portal into his nightmare realm and I was flung into the portal after a…incident and then I spent thirty years hopping dimensions.” Ford said with a wave of his hand while Danny stared at the man opened mouthed and bug eyed like he had just seen a…well, a ghost.   
“Wait…how did he trick you into building a portal?” Danny asked, a bemused smirk fluttering across his lips. “Didn’t you know where it went? My parents, when they built our portal, at least knew where it went, though granted that was also a horrible mistake.” 

“He was very persuasive.” Ford said with a growl before his eyebrows shot up to his grey hairline. “Wait what do you mean your parents have a portal?”   
Danny suddenly became very interested in the ceiling before gracefully gliding closer to hover over Mabel and Dipper’s shoulder to peer curiously at the marble innocently lying in Ford’s hand.  
“So…why would the Ringmaster want the crystalized eye of a demon?” Danny asked.   
“The city that I dreamed about. He was trying to get there.” Mabel said sadly “It was a lovely city, I can understand why.” 

Ford scratched his chin thoughtfully, rolling the marble over in his hand before dropping it into the little bag.   
“Perhaps he left something or someone in the city that he wanted.” Ford said with a dismissive shrug, “I suppose we won’t know for certain, will we?” Danny leaned back in the air, slightly disappointed as he folded his arms in thought.   
“So when can we leave?” Dipper asked, turning to smile as innocently and as sweetly as he could up at the floating ghost boy. 

Danny blinked. “I haven’t decided if I’m going to take you yet. Calm down, will you?” He chewed his lower lip in thought for a long moment, in which time Wendy screamed and tumbled down from the rafters with a taxidermy squirrel tangled in her hair and Danny waved a hand carelessly over his shoulder at her so that she hung in the air, green mist hanging around her, suspending her like a puppet on invisible strings before gently setting her on the ground. She blinked at Dipper wide eyed, and Dipper blinked back.   
“I should probably go home.” Danny said as though nothing had happened. “But then again my parents think I’m dead…” 

“Aren’t you?” Mabel asked, with a confused look. He waved off the question and ignored her, drifting back and forth through the air and as Dipper watched, the boy’s legs vanished all together to leave nothing but a fluttering tail of pale smoke from the waist down. Dipper looked over his uncle and the pair of them grinned while Ford tried to conspicuously draw out his tape measure. Wendy, her cool manner smoothing over the surprise of her fall, grinned as she inched her way closer to Danny to wave her hand through the trailing wisp of his tail. She giggled at Dipper and Dipper giggled with her while Danny didn’t seem to notice. 

“There’s also the fact that I killed Tucker and Sam, there’s no way around that. When I go home I’ll have to open up that can of worms, to Jazz and the town. I probably won’t be able to show my face as Danny Phantom ever again. If only I could apologize to Tucker and Sam.” Danny went on, muttering to himself softly.   
“If your friends are dead, maybe they’re in the Ghost Zone?” Dipper offered nudging Wendy in the ribs to keep her from trying to snag the end of Danny’s tail in her fingertips and Danny paused in his pace-flight, hovering for a moment before looking down at Dipper. 

“I mean…where else would they be?” Dipper asked as Ford quickly hide the tape measure behind his back with a guilty smile and Wendy grinned at him with something worse.   
“Good point.” Danny said slowly, with ever growing uncertainty. “I see no reason why they wouldn’t be there. Recently deceased ghosts end up in the Forest. So, we’ll check there first. If they’ve managed to get out of the Forest on their own then-”  
“Wait, we?” Dipper asked, hopefully. Danny smiled warmly.

“I’ll help you find your demon. But first we find Tucker and Sam. Oh and I want the demon eye.” Danny said, holding out his hand to Ford, who backed away from the extended palm like it was a threat, his face aghast.   
“Certainly not!”   
“It’s kind of like a map, right?” Danny said impatiently. “I know certain ghosts in the land of the dead that could potentially know how to work it or at least know how to get rid of it. The only thing it’s doing with you is gathering dust in a dice bag and watching Mabel make out with boys.” Danny said, his lips crocked with annoyance as his gaze flickered momentarily to a blushing Mabel. 

Ford wavered with uncertainty. “Forgive me, young man, I like you and all but I’m not certain how much I trust you.”   
To answer this, Danny held up his hand and a tiny diamond of ice crystalized at his fingertips. Dipper watched, jaw dropped with amazement as the fern of frost circled and blossomed on the diamond’s glittering surface. Then with a faint touch of his finger a bright green glow that emanated from somewhere inside the crystal started up and began to flicker and dance like a lantern. 

“Here.” Danny said, offering the crystal to Ford. “It’s a piece of my ectoplasm light encased in ice of my own making. This can act as a sampling of my DNA, you can track me, make weapons designed specifically to hurt me or trap me, whatever you wish to learn about me can be found in this.” He held up the crystal and its green light reflected in Ford’s hungry eyes. In one hand Danny held the ice crystal and with the other he held palm extended to Ford. “Do we have a deal?” 

Ford wavered, looking between Dipper who nodded eagerly, to Danny who waited patiently.   
“You’ll promise to watch out for my nephew?”   
“I’ll know I’ll have you to worry about if I don’t.” Danny said with a soft smile.   
“And I’m coming too right?” Mabel piped up, breaking the tension between the negotiations. Dipper snapped his head around to stare at her, his eyes begging for her to at least wait until the deal that would define his two-summers-long investigations came to a close. She smiled placidly between Ford who suddenly remembered that she was there, to Danny who looked surprised for a moment, then smiled. 

“I want to go. To this Ghost Zone. And after we’ve found Danny’s friends and Dipper’s demon, can we see if we can find the city using the eye?”   
Danny nodded. “Of course, I wasn’t really planning on you not coming.” The twinkle in his eye made Dipper wish there was some excuse he had for Mabel to stay.   
“Fine then, you’ll look after my nephew AND my niece?” Ford said and Danny nodded. Ford sighed and handed the dice bag over to the Danny. 

“I’d keep that out in the open as little as possible. I’d prefer if it had nothing of interest to see.”   
Danny nodded, dropping the crystal into Ford’s hand who grinned like he’d just been gifted the Holy Grail itself.   
“Alright, so what should I bring to the Ghost Zone?” Dipper said, digging into his backpack for a pen and pad of paper. “Will there be food? Water? Should I bring a compass? How many spare clothes do I need? Is there something that will make us blend in better?” 

Danny smiled at him and laughed. “Um…. Alright. In that order.” He began listing off answer on his fingertips. “Occasional but don’t rely on it. Not really a problem with my ice powers and if we decide to visit the Bifröst. You can, it’d be useless but you can. As many as you want, weight is hardly an issue in the Ghost Zone, though you might loose it. And…no, nothing will really make you ‘blend in’ exactly. It’s the Ghost Zone, no one really bats an eyelash over flaming skulls and flying ships, I guess you guys could make yourselves look less…alive if you really wanted to.” Danny said with a smile. 

“Are the dead not on friendly terms with the living?” Ford asked, clearly fascinated. Dipper was well aware of the fact that he and his uncle bore a similar resemblance with their eager expression and posed pens hovering over notebooks. Danny looked between them and winced slightly.   
“Something like that.” He said, a story hovering behind his words, Dipper could feel it.   
“Any other questions?” Danny asked, folding his arms smugly over his chest.  
“Can you feel your legs when you’re like that?” Dipper spluttered, pointing at the ghost boy’s fluttering tail. 

“No. Because they’re gone, obviously.” Danny said with a laugh. “So when do you want to leave Dipper?”   
Dipper’s pen jerked across his page suddenly, looking up at Danny open mouthed.   
“You mean we can leave right now?”   
Danny nodded, crackling a bit of green sparked in between his fingernails with boredom.   
“Yup. If you really want to.”   
He looked to Mabel, staring contemplatively out the window. Feeling her brother’s eyes on her, she shrugged thoughtlessly. 

“We’ll have to wait until Grunkle Stan comes back to say goodbye.”   
Dipper bit his lip, feeling awkward and uncomfortable. “Grunkle Stan might not let us go.” He countered, looking over to Ford for assistance. “He’ll say it’s too dangerous.”   
“That’s reasonable considering what happened to the last family member that went through a portal.” Mabel said, throwing a glance over at Ford, who guilty shuffled his feet back and forth at the mentioning. 

“He might have issue, you’re right Mabel. I might have issue with this.” He said, looking down at the crystal in his hand with a suddenly regretful air.   
“Come on, you weren’t much older when you started hopping worlds.” Dipper said, his heart falling his chest as he filled his eyes with the desperate plead, the longing that raged in his soul and parched his lips with a thirst that couldn’t be satisfied by anything short of the truth.   
“And that didn’t turn out for me.” Ford said sharply but looking at Dipper’s eager face he sighed.   
“But I know. I know that look in your eye Dipper, it was the one I had in mine when I first came to Gravity Falls. I won’t stop you from finding your answers. Since you’ll just do it behind my back anyway.” He gave his nephew a weak smile and Dipper grinned at the man before turning back to his sister, her eyes filled with pain. 

“So…you’re saying we should leave without telling him? Without saying goodbye?” Mabel asked weakly.   
“We won’t be gone for too long, a couple of days at the most, right?” Dipper asked, turning to Danny who blinked at him with those startling green eyes.   
“…um…sure.”   
“Sure?” Ford demanded.   
“Well, I wouldn’t book any appointments or anything. It’s the Ghost Zone, unpredictability is kind of its thing.” Danny said helplessly. Mabel’s eyes widened and her face fell substantially.   
“Oh…I see.”   
“You don’t have to come if you don’t want to.” Dipper assured her, though his heart ached when he said the words. 

“No, no it’s fine. I want to come. I’ll write a note to Stan and Soos. Then…I guess we can leave.”   
Dipper laughed and running up to his sister threw his arms around her.   
“Thank you, thank you! OK, I’ll get my stuff, we’ll leave as soon as possibly.”   
Dipper raced upstairs, pausing to fist bump Wendy and didn’t turn back to see all the eyes staring after him. 

 

When her brother had gone, Mabel went outside to sit on the front porch steps in hope against hope that her Grunkle Stan would show up before they left, the day was turning out to be a beauty, the balmy summer breeze ruffling the pine needles playfully as the birds sang sweetly, mere streaks in the robin egg blue sky. 

“Off on another adventure, I see.” A familiar voice said at her side. She wasn’t sure when the King of the Cats had appeared but he curled up at her side, a purr vibrating from his body as he absently licked a white painted paw.   
“I thought you would have gone with the rest of the ghosts.” Mabel said, running a few fingers over his white tipped ears and down his sleek back. She felt his body arch under her touch, though he didn’t grace her with one of his heinous smiles. He tilted his head up to gaze at her with eyes that glowed a lovely shade of liquid gold. 

“Wow, now you really are a king, you have gold in your eyes.” Mabel said with a laugh, the creature twitched its whiskers in amusement.   
“I came here to thank you. One of us ought to. Thank you Mabel, for setting me free. No cat enjoys captivity, and their king enjoys it least of all.” He said with a playful smirk. “Feel free to find me in the Ghost Zone or at least…don’t be so surprised if I come finding you.” 

“Thank you.” Mabel said, and she meant it too, having more than one ally in a strange place was always a bonus. “Though your advice is difficult to make use of.”   
“Advice?” The cat asked,   
“The thing about the moon and the seventh son and people not wanting to be stolen from.”   
The cat stared at her, honey coloured eyes that she was almost tempted to fall into and be lost forever.   
“I don’t remember telling you that. My life as a circus cat is a bit blurry, so you’ll have to figure out the answers for yourself.” 

“If there was an answer.” Mabel scoffed, teasingly.   
The cat chuckled, “Yes, if there was.”   
Mabel sighed, leaning back to let the sun warm his legs. “I’m going to miss this place. I hope not too much of our summer is spent in some creepy ghost place.”   
“If you’re worried, don’t leave.” The King of the Cats said frankly.   
“But Dipper’s going, you see.” Mabel told him, stroking his otter sleek black fur contemplatively. “And without me, he’s terribly lost. Besides…” She trailed off, letting her thoughts drift away on the breeze as she thought of the smiling ghost that drifted so carelessly through their gift shop and how his green eyes glittered like peridot. 

The summer day carried on in its blissful hazy delight, the sky begged for kites to be flown and old fireworks to be set off, it was a day for popsicles that dripped onto the porch and lounging by the pool, doing blissfully nothing. She liked the bliss of nothingness and was so well aware that those lazy summer days would dwindle away to nothing in no time. Then she’d be back at school where people thought her nothing but a ditz that couldn’t learn the periodic table because she was too distracted by its drab colouration. 

Where Dipper faded into his books and his studies and resurfaced only for mealtimes. Where he cowered at shadows and she tried and failed to impress boys. Here they were different, here they were heroes, brave and daring. And yet now they would leave. She sighed and gathering the cat up into her arms she stood, brushed the sand from her shorts and headed back inside the hut to prepare to leave her lovely Gravity Falls. 

 

Dear Grunkle Stan,   
I hope you found your treasure! Danny (the pasty punk) has agreed to take us to where ghosts live in order to see if we can find Bill. I know you’ll probably be mad…that’s why we left before you could tell us no. Don’t worry, Danny made some sort of blood oath promise with Ford to take good care of us and I promise I’ll take good care of Dipper. We’ll be back home before you know it, I’ll try and get in contact with you as soon as I can. We’re bringing warm clothes, granola bars and juice boxes to last us a good few weeks. I’m bringing a camera so we can add some new creepy pictures to my scrapbook. Please don’t fight with Ford while we’re gone, he and Dipper have this ‘pursuit of the unknown’ kind of understanding. Dipper asked Ford to come but he said no, he didn’t want anymore new dimensional travels and plus he thought you’d get lonely (don’t tell him I said that). I’m sorry we didn’t get a proper goodbye.   
Bye Grunkle Stan   
We love you 

Dear Soos,   
Take care of the Shack while we’re gone, we’re off to find Ghosts and monsters and more trouble! Stay rad big dude!   
Love Hand-bone 

Two little notes tapped to the front door of a gift shop fluttered in the breeze of a summer day, patiently waiting for its recipients. While somewhere behind the Shack a green glow ruffled the pine tree and scent the birds scattering into the clouds. On the porch, a six-fingered man quickly sipped a steaming mug of tea, regretting his decisions. In his hand he held a glowing green crystal, and between the treetops, the tent flags of Circus Gothic still fluttered alone and abandoned. 

He wondered how long they’d be up for until the mayor decided to take them down. As he watched one of the black flags ripped itself loose and fluttered through the breeze like a lost kite cut from its string. He wondered about the whispers that would flutter through the town, of the strange circus and its stranger disappearing performers, wondered if anyone would think too hard or speculate too long about such a lovely bazaar occurrence or if they would shove it away in the back of their mind, where people usually put the odd and the strange in order to stay sane. It made him smile as he stretched his six fingers and pondered at his niece and nephew, who would seek out the strange, hunt down the answers rather than flee from it. Maybe he had made a good decision after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello my dears!   
> It's been such a wonderful experience writing to you all! Thank you for all the comments and kudos, you guys are fantastic! I was planning this to be the beginning of a little break before I start the next section. So I took the week to work on other projects and do other things besides writing but then I thought to myself 'wait...this vacation sucks.' So I'll probably get back to it sooner than I was planning. With any luck I'll be back by the end of October with more adventures waiting for you!   
> Bye for now!   
> A.H.


End file.
